Jan. 31, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:40:53
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unidentified
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All right, people, we are back. | |
| I jokingly said that we were gonna crash the internet, and I'm pretty sure we crashed YouTube, literally out of every livestream we have ever done. | ||
| We have never had an issue. | ||
| I don't know what happened there. | ||
| I have conferred with these two fine men, and we're not willing to completely go down the conspiracy theory yet. | ||
| We're going to have to just recap what happened in 10 minutes. | ||
| I believe, well first off, Ben Shapiro to my left, ironically, Jordan Peterson to my right. | ||
| I believe that we are fully, right now, in an idea revolution. | ||
| We talked about this for about 10 minutes. | ||
| We'll try to recap a little bit of what we started with and then get to some all new stuff. | ||
| As I've said to the guys, they're welcome to talk directly to each other. | ||
| If they have questions for me, there are no rules here. | ||
| There are never rules in here, but truly today there are no rules. | ||
| And I think that these guys are in the thick of something just tremendously important right now and relevant, and that's why they're blowing up the way that they are. | ||
| Okay, let's try to do some of that again, although you guys were both quite eloquent 10 minutes ago. | ||
| Idea revolution, do you believe that we are in an idea revolution right now? | ||
| Well, this is what I think's happening, I think, and I think this accounts for the attractiveness of the content that I've put on YouTube. | ||
| So, when Nietzsche diagnosed the death of God about 150 years ago, and he made three predictions. | ||
| He said, as a consequence, our culture will shape to the roots, will become nihilistic or totalitarian in response, Or we'll invent our own values. | ||
| Those were his three possibilities. | ||
| And then, of course, we became nihilistic and totalitarian through the 20th century, and many tens of millions of people died as a consequence, which Nietzsche also foretold specifically. | ||
| He said that a hundred million people would die because of the rise of communist ideas. | ||
| He said that in Will to Power. | ||
| So then he predicted that, well, we would have to invent our own values. | ||
| Then the psychoanalysts came along. | ||
| They said, well, wait a second. | ||
| You can't create your own values, because you're not master in your own house. | ||
| There are forces operating inside of you that are autonomous. | ||
| And for Freud, those were primarily biological forces. | ||
| But Jung took that a step further, and he said, wait a minute, biology is a lot more sophisticated and complex than you think, and there are symbolic forces at work. | ||
| He thought of the archetypes as images of the instincts, for example. | ||
| But the instincts were a lot more sophisticated than people thought. | ||
| So it's not just an instinct to aggression, let's say. | ||
| There's an instinct to operating properly, so that you walk up human hierarchies of competence. | ||
| It'd be something like that. | ||
| And that's an archetype of the ideal, in some sense. | ||
| Jung thought the gods didn't disappear, they went inside, they went into the psyche, and so he dove down as far as he could dive to find out what those eternal images were, and to bring them back up to the surface. | ||
| And that's what I've been continuing, I would say, in my lectures. | ||
| I'm saying, look, there are elements to the ancient story that are not only... they're deeply correct, and you cannot live And you live in hell unless you know them it's something like that and that's the case so and I think that's I'm hoping that's what is happening is that people are starting to understand that | ||
| People's lives do have a transcendent purpose. | ||
| That's the most appropriate way of looking at life. | ||
| That our brains are, in fact, evolved to reveal that purpose to us. | ||
| Which I also believe. | ||
| I think the neurological evidence in that regard is quite clear. | ||
| I believe that. | ||
| And so, I'm hoping that we're at the end of post-modern despair. | ||
| That's what I'm hoping. | ||
| Yeah, so to me, what you're giving there is sort of a realist version of religion. | ||
| You're saying these stories are needed for a very real way. | ||
| I suspect you basically agree with that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I do. | ||
| And what's fascinating about this is, I mean, Jordan may be closer to Aristotle than I am to Plato, but I think that we almost have a Platonic versus Aristotelian argument going on here because It seems like what you're talking about is the idea that if we dig down deep enough into our biologies and into our neural networks, what we find is a common set of shared values that, if you refuse to acknowledge them, leads to grave unhappiness. | ||
| At every level. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| And what I'm coming from is almost a platonic idea, which is that the mind of man reflects the mind of God to the extent that not only is, I would argue, is an Orthodox Jew, revelation is necessary, but even if you don't use revelation, that using your capacity to reason, you can find a purpose In something above, but we end up at the same place, which is the set of values that if you actually, if you stray away from this common set of values, and I'm talking like the most root level values, personal responsibility, free will, it's your job to be responsible for members of your family. | ||
| It's your job to make good decisions and responsible decisions and not to blame the society around you for failures that you are yourself responsible for. | ||
| You can't surpass your own innate capacity in You can't expect society to make up for your lack of innate capacity in certain areas. | ||
| You just have to make the most of what you have in front of you. | ||
| You and I agree on the values, but I think that the source of the values, there's going to be a slight disagreement. | ||
| Well, I think it's a profound place for disagreement. | ||
| And I don't understand how to mediate it exactly, because I'm not willing to dispense with the metaphysical. | ||
| No, when I did my biblical lectures last year, I called them a psychological approach to biblical stories, right? | ||
| Because I wanted to push a secular interpretation, a scientific interpretation of those stories. | ||
| Which, by the way, is just not to interrupt, but I think that that's supremely useful to people, specifically because I mean, despite the fact that I come from a religious background, I'm trying to make arguments that are not religious in orientation. | ||
| I never cite to the Bible when I talk about values, for example. | ||
| I never cite to Revelation. | ||
| It's valuable to me because I think that that's a good source of the values and I think that it's a relevant source of the values, but it is not the only way to achieve those values. | ||
| I've never suggested, for example, that atheists can't be moral or that you can't be an agnostic and not believe in Judeo-Christian systems of Revelation and come to the same exact set of values that we're talking about now. | ||
| Well, and it's also a simpler argument to make, because you constrain the number of necessary variables, right? | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| But having said that, I'm not willing to dispense with the metaphysical. | ||
| And I'm stretching the edges of my cognitive ability when I'm talking about this sort of thing, because I'm in realms that I don't understand, that I'm just getting vague pictures of. | ||
| But I think it's as if... | ||
| There's a revelation from evolution that matches the revelation from above. | ||
| The two things come together. | ||
| And I don't understand how that can be possible. | ||
| I think it has something to do with the fundamental nature of consciousness, which is something we seriously do not understand. | ||
| And so, I can see you can make a straight biological case for the evolution of archetypes. | ||
| But I don't think that the biological explanation exhausts the archetype. | ||
| There's more to it because and what I've learned to in delving into these religious stories | ||
| But also into religious experience is that it's bottomless like there is a point where? | ||
| As you dig into the archetypal everything turns into one thing | ||
| Biological spiritual transcendent. It's all one thing from the top to the bottom | ||
| And I think people get intimations of that when they have profound experiences | ||
| Experiences that are generated by music for example if I love or by sex or there's a variety of ways that they can | ||
| be anytime Experience of meaning in your life and I can also see that | ||
| and I believe this to be the case is that you are You're neurologically adapted to a universe where meaning | ||
| is the highest instinct and I mean that Technically is that when you're sitting in a situation | ||
| where what's happening around you is meaningful What your nervous system is signaling to you is that you | ||
| occupy the optimal position in the dynamic? | ||
| Territory that you currently inhabit and that's and that sense of meaning is it's not just cortical | ||
| It's it's way deeper than merely cortical. And so that's a very exciting. That's a very exciting | ||
| Discovery, I would say I think that because again a place where we agree is that meaning is uncovered. It's not | ||
| something it's discovered It's not something that you're making up yourself. And that's | ||
| why I think it's revealed exactly and because we're going happiness | ||
| exactly and I think that one of the reasons that that the message that we're putting out there is making people | ||
| happier, actually. | ||
| Even though we're both pessimists by nature, I would think, is that what we're basically saying is that in this land of | ||
| chaos, where you could be wandering around with no meaning, there | ||
| is a meaning. | ||
| And if you search for it, you'll find it, but you have to be open to the concept | ||
| that there is a meaning to be discovered. | ||
| And if you shut yourself off from that by just saying, there's no meaning to be discovered, meaning is to be made | ||
| up by you, and you can just do what you want. | ||
| Or it's epiphenomenal. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| It's just something that you experience, but it's not really real. | ||
| That kind of stuff is, I think, disquieting to people. | ||
| And so there's something that quiets the soul. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes, that's a possibility. | ||
| that says you have purpose, and if you don't have purpose, | ||
| then maybe it's because you're searching in the wrong places for that purpose. | ||
| Yes, yes, that's a possibility. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| There's a few interesting things that you said there, because it's like, I know you guys pretty well at this | ||
| point and this crew of people that we're sort of in. | ||
| When we're off camera, we're actually talking about the exact same things. | ||
| Like we are, whether this camera was on right now or off, like we're living this thing all the time. | ||
| I think it's, I can speak from my own experience in this regard, it's made me a better person and I'm still striving to be a better. | ||
| How? | ||
| I'm more authentic, I'm more honest, I'm constantly, I mean, I sit in this chair when it's over there and look at the person over here every week and I actually hear and I listen and I sit across great minds and I go, wow, I have to reevaluate some of the things that I think and sometimes it's because I disagree with someone. | ||
| You know, and I'm like, they really don't know what they're talking about, but often it's hopefully that I'm hearing somebody say some great things. | ||
| This is what's really interesting, and I think what's great about conversations like this one is when, if I have Jordan on my Facebook Live and I ask him questions, or he'll have me on his YouTube and he's asking questions, what we're all really in the business of, all of us who are occupying the space, is asking questions. | ||
| And we're treated as weird because we're asking the questions, right? | ||
| And actually listening to the answers. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Because I always think, well, you know, you might have something to tell me. | ||
| That's my rule number 11, by the way, right? | ||
| Assume that the person you're listening to might know something you don't. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And because then they can tell that to you, and if you learn it, then you don't have to run face first into a brick wall. | ||
| It's like, it's really helpful. | ||
| And from Jewish tradition, that's deeply embedded in Jewish tradition, that the wise man is the man who learns from every man around him. | ||
| And so this idea is what unifies this really disparate stream of people, right? | ||
| The three of us, people like Sam Harris, people like Joe Rogan. | ||
| I mean, like, you look at me and Joe Rogan, I'm not sure what we have in common, but we like asking questions and we like actually listening to the answers. | ||
| You actually look like you might be different species of being, you know what I mean? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Well, that's, I found the same thing when I was on Jocko Willink's podcast. | ||
| It's like, you know, we're very different people. | ||
| But that's what's in common, is that we're able to have a conversation. | ||
| We're actually able to have a conversation. | ||
| And that we're aiming, I think, we're all aiming at making things better rather than worse, which is also a very important thing to manage. | ||
| I also think one of the things that makes that happen is the fact that we are, as you say, talking about first principles all the time. | ||
| When people talk at the top of the iceberg, then it's impossible for them to even see sometimes that they're actually standing on two different icebergs. | ||
| Right? | ||
| They're not seeing the commonalities and they're not seeing what's different. | ||
| If I argue first principles with somebody, then you can see how those first principles manifest in political differences in the business that I'm in. | ||
| But if you're just arguing about a certain political policy without examining anything that goes underneath there, then you just end up clubbing each other and not even understanding what the other person is saying because you don't understand the set of values that are deriving those political principles. | ||
| Part of the problem that we have right now in our culture is trying to diagnose the level at which the discussion should be taking place. | ||
| And I think the reason that this is a tumultuous time is because it actually is a time for discussion of first principles. | ||
| And first principles are virtually at the level of theology, right? | ||
| Because first principles are the things that you assume and then move forward. | ||
| It's like, well, what should we assume? | ||
| Well, the dignity of the human soul. | ||
| Let's start with that. | ||
| You can't treat yourself properly without assuming that. | ||
| You can't have a relationship with another person. | ||
| You can't stabilize your family. | ||
| You can't have a functional society. | ||
| So what does it mean for this human soul to have dignity? | ||
| Well, part of the idea is that you're participating in creation itself. | ||
| And you do that with your actions and your language. | ||
| And you get to decide whether you're tilting the world a bit more towards heaven or a bit more towards hell. | ||
| And that's actually what you're doing! | ||
| So that's a place where the literal and the metaphorical truth come together. | ||
| And people are very... | ||
| They're terrified of that idea, as they should be, because it's a massive responsibility. | ||
| It's a massive realization of responsibility to understand that all the decisions that you make during the day are decisions between hell and heaven, essentially. | ||
| But I think there is no truer way of saying that. | ||
| So as you guys have both sort of hit the level that you're at, and I was at the turning point thing with I got a standing ovation. | ||
| a couple of weeks ago and you literally came out, it was like the Rolling Stones came out. | ||
| I mean, people were going bananas. | ||
| I talked about all my political differences with them that we've discussed about being pro-choice | ||
| and for gay marriage, although they're basically okay with that and being pro-pot and all that. | ||
| And I got a standing ovation. | ||
| We did our thing in Clemson and the line for you after was longer than the line for me. | ||
| And I told you this, but I was like, man, that makes me want to be better. | ||
| I wasn't jealous of you. | ||
| I was like, man, he's doing something great and I have to be better. | ||
| So my question for you is, this was all meant to be, right? | ||
| I mean, without going too religious or metaphysical, but the internet has now allowed all of the people that were watching television and seeing pop culture and going, something is really wrong here, something is missing. | ||
| The internet has sort of forced us together. | ||
| I mean, this growing group, it's not because we're all looking for it, it's because we're being forced together. | ||
| And what's really funny is the way that everybody's introduced to our work is the same way, but it's the way that you wouldn't expect. | ||
| So most people, I think, Jordan, originally saw you in a confrontation with somebody over transgender pronouns, right? | ||
| And that's how most people began to engage. | ||
| And then suddenly you were getting 500,000 views on discussions of biblical stories from which, I mean, let's be frank, | ||
| if the first thing never happens, those things have 5,000 views, right? | ||
| And the same thing is true for me, right? | ||
| The way that I originally kind of drew public attention was because I was on Piers Morgan's show | ||
| and I shall act him on a show. | ||
| And so all of a sudden, people were now listening to hour-long lectures | ||
| about my ideas on philosophy and root principles of the founding fathers. | ||
| They came for the scandal and stayed for the content. | ||
| And that's, I think, the advantage. | ||
| It takes a particular skill set for everyone in this space to be able to do that, | ||
| but that's the beauty of the YouTube moment and of the internet moment, | ||
| is that people are engaging in the news level. | ||
| If you just watch any cable news channel, the news cycle is about 30 seconds long, | ||
| then they release the headlines again. | ||
| And so that's the level at which we consume. | ||
| But if you see, everybody sees the flashpoint for you or the flashpoint for me | ||
| or the flashpoint for Sam with Ben Affleck or the flashpoint for you, many of them for you. | ||
| And then they want more. | ||
| And it's the introduction of, it's basically the gateway drug. | ||
| Like there's a 30 second video that's the gateway drug to these hour long lectures about deeper principles. | ||
| And the question is why those flashpoints flash. | ||
| And I think because, what makes those different? | ||
| What makes it that people want to see that and then they go, okay, now I want to see the rest of their content and start streaming tons of videos from these folks. | ||
| Well, that Kathy Newman video is a good example of that. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| So let's get to that in one second. | ||
| I just want to leave that with one thing. | ||
| My quick answer is just that I think it's incongruity. | ||
| They see something different. | ||
| And if you notice difference in the society on any level, then you're automatically a pariah and an outlier. | ||
| And we all know deep down that there are distinctions and differences to be made logically between. | ||
| I'm not talking about groups of people ethnically, you know, for some odd reason. | ||
| I'm talking about just logical distinctions between modes of thought and logical distinctions between uh... between certain policies and if you if you are | ||
| willing to draw distinctions instead of just saying that we have to exist | ||
| in this morass of identity politics | ||
| that's a it's a flash in the darkness and people gravitate toward the light | ||
| like moths. Well it's partly because the problem with | ||
| the problem with relativism let's say | ||
| Let's say that that did produce a radical state of equality. | ||
| Well, the problem with that is that there's no up. | ||
| And the problem with there being no up is there's no hope. | ||
| And the problem with that is that people actually live on hope. | ||
| So if you flatten out the value structure so that there's no qualitative differentiation between things, then there's nothing to do. | ||
| So that's just not helpful. | ||
| And so then you can tell people, look, make no mistake about it, there is down. | ||
| That's hell. | ||
| That's Auschwitz. | ||
| That's the gulags. | ||
| Like, that's down. | ||
| That exists. | ||
| That exists in your own family. | ||
| You can create that with no problem. | ||
| And because there's a down like that, there's also an up. | ||
| And the up is worth aiming at, even though it differentiates people as they climb towards it. | ||
| It's still, without that, you can't have the purpose in your life that gives it meaning and nobility in the face of suffering. | ||
| People know that. | ||
| That's interesting, because that's why I sort of think it's almost like we're all Frankenstein's monster in a weird way. | ||
| If the mainstream media had been dealing honestly with the issues of the day, whatever they are, identity politics or post-modernism, or just the general political discussion, then I don't think people would react to you guys the way that they do, because they didn't do their job, but really quickly, because you hit these. | ||
| I think there are three moments, and you already hit them, but just for people that aren't following all of this. | ||
| You on Piers Morgan. | ||
| basically bashing him endlessly with facts over feelings about guns was one, where it was like this guy from the internet just beat this CNN person. | ||
| How did that happen? | ||
| And then I think the one that changed me more than anything else, everyone knows this already, was Sam Harris on Real Time with Affleck, and they got into this stuff about the difference between Muslims and Islam. | ||
| I didn't even know who Sam was. | ||
| I see this mild-mannered neuroscientist in a nice suit calmly talking about Pew statistics. | ||
| Next thing you know, he's gross and racist. | ||
| But this is a good segue to yours, because I think yours is the third one, and the way that it, this is just two or three weeks ago, you were on with Kathy Newman on, it's Canada Channel 4? | ||
| No, it was UK Channel 4. | ||
| UK Channel 4, sorry. | ||
| And there's, I mean everyone that's watching this has probably seen this already. | ||
| If you haven't, you should go watch it. | ||
| And if you haven't, you should go watch it. | ||
| But in effect, basically she tried to make an argument that you have heard a gajillion times before, but why does your right to free speech supersede a trans person's right to feel okay with themselves or something? | ||
| Even the way she phrased the question was a little confused and conflated. | ||
| But the reaction to it, your answer was great, but it was the reaction. | ||
| The regular people watching at home, they were going, this is nonsense. | ||
| This is just abject nonsense. | ||
| Well, the thing that made it viral was the fact that she recognized in the moment that what she was saying was nonsense. | ||
| It was the moment where you could see the light go on briefly, and she just went, wait, what did I just say? | ||
| And there was no escape. | ||
| It was pretty grand. | ||
| Yeah, well, the funny thing about her argument is that it was predicated on the idea that somehow people have a right to be comfortable. | ||
| That's just not a right you have in life. | ||
| Of all the things you can say that you don't have a right to in life, being comfortable is number one. | ||
| Which you made that point to me. | ||
| You can offend me right now. | ||
| So the thing is, if your right to be comfortable trumps my right to talk, then I don't get to talk. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| Because I'm going to say things, if I'm actually talking, I'm going to say things, if they're profound things, if they're contentious things or truthful things, I'm going to say things that, if they don't disturb you, are going to disturb you, and if they don't disturb you, there's someone that's going to be disturbed about them. | ||
| So, what's the answer to that? | ||
| Everyone can be comfortable in the silence. | ||
| But that also doesn't work because then we can't exchange ideas. | ||
| We're not comfortable in the silence. | ||
| We're isolated and dead in the silence. | ||
| So it's a completely incoherent perspective. | ||
| But what does that tell you about just the way mainstream media operates? | ||
| Because if you even, even just in this last week, when I've read some of the pieces about you that I think are so dishonestly attacking the way you do things, or even, you know, I'll see, there was an article about you and it was like, Ben Shapiro is the cool kid's philosopher or something, something like that. | ||
| Yeah, New York Times, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and it was like, well, Wait a minute, when did the cool kid be the smart orthodox Jew? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| How did that happen? | ||
| It's a new one to me. | ||
| Right, but think about that. | ||
| And then you've talked about the shit that you went through when you were growing up and all that stuff, and you don't want to play the victim. | ||
| I get my ass kicked regularly. | ||
| But I can't imagine why. | ||
| It's exactly the same boat. | ||
| It's like small and noisy. | ||
| It's a bad combination. | ||
| Oh man, I could have taken care of both of you. | ||
| I always say I was right on the middle of sort of like loser and cool. | ||
| So like I actually did bully the kids below me, but I was bullied by the guys that were, | ||
| I was right there. | ||
| Maybe that's- That's how God keeps the world in balance. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| But this idea that when they write the article, it's the cool kids philosopher, | ||
| even though obviously you didn't grow up as the cool kid, or James Damore is a great one | ||
| where they write articles about him and they'll say, the tech bro. | ||
| And it's like if you both have met James Damore, he's the shyest, quietest, Not to use your model, but I think that they're trying to impose their own order on the chaos. | ||
| He's got a spine of steel, though. | ||
| It's really something. | ||
| Fearless, despite what his disposition may actually be. | ||
| But what do you make of that? | ||
| The way that they try to frame it, so they're already trying to undercut you, | ||
| you know what I mean? | ||
| Before you even say anything. | ||
| Not to use your model, but I think that they're trying to impose their own order on the chaos. | ||
| It's just the wrong frame. | ||
| Well, that's what happened in the Channel 4 interview. | ||
| I was thinking about the model that you were describing with regards to your position on the iceberg, is that Cathy had staked out a position on the iceberg, and I had staked one out that was way lower, way lower, and what happened was she kept questioning me at her level of analysis, and that just wasn't working, because that wasn't the level of analysis at which I'm playing, and I'm also not playing, although I'm trying to play. | ||
| That's what I mean. | ||
| Because it's better if you can play a little bit. | ||
| It's like wrestling. | ||
| You had a lower base of gravity. | ||
| And I think that that gave you an advantage. | ||
| Well, partly I wasn't trying to win the interview. | ||
| And I don't try to win interviews. | ||
| I try to go to an interview and have a talk and have a discussion and see how it goes. | ||
| And I don't have an agenda except to not make a catastrophic mistake. | ||
| That's agenda number one. | ||
| Don't say anything unforgivably stupid. | ||
| But I think that's the other thing that makes all of this unique, is that if you actually meet, and we've all met each other in this circle now, because it's really funny how life works that way, these circles are so small, but we know each other and we actually talk with each other and all this. | ||
| That's what I'm saying, they're forcing us together, it's not even that we're seeking each other. | ||
| But it's also that we all have a certain, there's a certain baseline personality that we all have, and that is we enjoy the | ||
| discussion. | ||
| We actually enjoy the exchange of ideas. | ||
| And so when you're on with Kathy Newman and she says stuff that like what you were | ||
| getting from the right wing a lot was, how did he even stand this? | ||
| How do you even stand this interview? | ||
| Right. | ||
| How can you get through half an hour of this? | ||
| And you've done it and I've done it too. | ||
| And the answer is because I sort of enjoy it. | ||
| I mean, this is what we do for a living, right? | ||
| So the idea that I don't enjoy having conversations, even with people who don't get it, it's not enjoyable having your views radically mischaracterized as Kathy Newman was trying to do to you. | ||
| That's irritating. | ||
| Well, that was so over the top that it was hardly even irritating. | ||
| Well, I was, because I kept thinking, well, I don't know who you're talking to, but it isn't me. | ||
| Right, exactly, exactly. | ||
| And so because of that, that's the most infuriating thing to people on the hardcore left and in the media, because if they can't fit you into that frame, it's what you were saying before the show started. | ||
| If they can't fit you into this preconceived Russian nesting doll that they've got for you, if you don't fit in there, then they can't do anything with you. | ||
| And if you're an open-minded person who actually likes to hear exchange of ideas and you're willing to admit that there's a piece of evidence you may not have considered yet, it's almost impossible to be caught off guard. | ||
| But these people refuse to acknowledge that there's evidence they haven't considered yet, | ||
| or they just throw away the evidence. | ||
| Like if I brought you a piece of evidence that contradicts your worldview, you'd say, | ||
| okay, that either fits in my worldview or it doesn't. | ||
| If it doesn't, but it's a real piece of evidence, here's how I have to kind of shape and change | ||
| my worldview in order to accommodate that piece of evidence. | ||
| And I think that's what smart and decent people do, but the media is not in that business. | ||
| I think that's why Joe's show is successful. | ||
| It's because, you know, he's not a classical intellectual. | ||
| He talks about ideas a lot. | ||
| But the thing about Joe is he's actually curious. | ||
| When he asks a question, he'd like to know the answer, you know? | ||
| And it's not so that he can demonstrate that he's right. | ||
| Like, he has his viewpoints, obviously, like everyone does, because you have to have a viewpoint. | ||
| But he does ask the questions he'd like to know the answers to. | ||
| And YouTube seems to reward that. | ||
| So, hooray for that. | ||
| The fact that it's a longer forum, a longer span forum, is also a non-trivial advantage, because people can take the time to dig into something. | ||
| I've been thinking a lot about what makes all of these various people of such different stripes successful, and what I realized is that So much of it is just like in any movie. | ||
| The reason you watch a movie is because you know where the movie is going to end. | ||
| It's going to end with the movie turning off the screen and then you're going to leave the theater, right? | ||
| Every movie ends the same way. | ||
| But you're there for the journey. | ||
| And so when you watch your show, Dave, and you're actually trying to pursue things and take people along your thought journey, and when you watch your lectures on the Bible and you're taking them along a journey, a journey of exploration, And certainly with Joe's show, where Joe is taking you for three hours through his thought process, asking questions, and going somewhere. | ||
| And even when I'm doing my political show, my idea is, here, I'm going to lay out all the evidence, and then I'm going to try and piece it together so that we get to a conclusion together. | ||
| And you can disagree with any step I take along that way, but here's the journey that we're going to go along so you can follow along with me. | ||
| I think what the media do is they just go straight from the beginning of the movie to the end of the movie with no journey in between. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| They just go, OK, here's the intro. | ||
| Luke Skywalker is on a planet by himself. | ||
| And then you just go straight to the Millennium Falcon flying away. | ||
| You're like, wait, wait, wait. | ||
| What happened in the middle there? | ||
| How'd you get from A to B? | ||
| So is that why we then, or let's say your moment with Kathy, that we're sort of the glitch in the system now. | ||
| Like to me that was- We're the undecidables in postmodern terms. | ||
| There you go, right, that's it. | ||
| That's a glitch, like if we were watching The Matrix, that's the glitch. | ||
| That you got to the, wasn't on YouTube, this was on real television, not that that even matters more than this, because I think this is the real thing now, but you caused a glitch. | ||
| That's what you did. | ||
| You caused the glitch in her. | ||
| She actually couldn't come up with words after. | ||
| But you actually, it was actually a glitch in the system that then elevated everything else that you're doing. | ||
| There was an imposed narrative. | ||
| And I mean, part of that's a consequence of the pathology of the medium, I would say, is that one of the things that's really, like I stopped watching televised news like 25 years ago. | ||
| But one of the things that made me stop was my realization that the newscasters would show a politician Right? | ||
| And then they'd give him like his 10 seconds or her 10 seconds to say something. | ||
| Then they'd fade out the audio. | ||
| Then the newscaster would tell you what the person said and what it meant. | ||
| And I thought, oh, that's not so good. | ||
| There's something gone horribly wrong there. | ||
| And I think it's become more and more like that over the last 30 years. | ||
| Partly I think that's because journalism itself, classic journalism, is degenerating. | ||
| You know, it's becoming a more and more desperate game for smaller and smaller stakes. | ||
| But YouTube offers something that the traditional broadcasters just can't offer. | ||
| And that's weirdly enough for something that started out with cute cat videos. | ||
| It's actual depth and the capacity to have like a three-hour conversation. | ||
| Turns out people actually like that. | ||
| But that's why I think that you two are particularly interesting cases, because I view you as sort of like a pure political beast, and yet you've, because of all of this, you now talk about religion, I think more than probably you inherently want to, perhaps, or all of these other things, and you, as a clinical psychologist, that's where you really started, and now you end up talking about politics all the time. | ||
| So again, this is why we all sort of got forced into this. | ||
| Well, because I think that in the end, we end up in the same frameworks that the ancient Greeks ended up in, right? | ||
| They would all write a book on ethics, and they'd write one on politics, and then they would write one on the polity, and it all comes together. | ||
| I mean, there is no such thing as apolitical, but by the same token, there's no such thing as aethical. | ||
| I mean, if you are operating in the sphere of politics, you are going to end up, if you dig deep enough, in the same waters that Jordan is used to being. | ||
| And if Jordan elevates up on that chain far enough, he's going to end up in the sphere where I'm used to operating, which is why there are videos of you talking to transgender people about pronoun use. | ||
| What happened to me, I think, was that I was operating at a, let's call it a psychological level, And a level of archetypal story, essentially. | ||
| And then the political intervened in that and said, I'm going to interfere with your freedom of speech. | ||
| It's like, no! | ||
| That's not happening. | ||
| I know where that goes. | ||
| Well, and then, of course, one of the scandals that emerged out of that this year was the scandal of Lindsay Shepard at Wilfrid Laurier University, which was the biggest scandal that ever hit a Canadian university. | ||
| And it was like, had I... | ||
| In my most pessimistic prognostications about the consequences of Bill C-16, I didn't envision the inquisition of Lindsey Shepard. | ||
| And so thank you very much, postmodernists, for making that manifest so clearly. | ||
| I'll be the ignoramus in the room, so can you tell that story? | ||
| Oh, well, there was a teaching assistant, She had a great episode on the Rubin Report. | ||
| She's quite the creature. | ||
| They messed with the wrong girl when they went after her. | ||
| She was in the communications department at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada and she had the temerity to show a five minute clip of me just debating The biological reality of gender, let's say, with Professor Nicholas Matt, who famously claimed that there were no biological differences between men and women, and that was the scientific consensus for the last four decades. | ||
| She showed a five-minute clip to her class. | ||
| Well, and hypothetically someone complained, although it turned out that no one really did, and that was brought to the attention of her professors and to an administrator named Adria Joel, who was basically hired as a, you know, As an inquisitionist, I would say, by the university, under legislative pressure, and they raked her over the coals for an hour, and she taped it. | ||
| And she made it public. | ||
| And it was a tape in which they compared, they said that playing a video of me debating pronouns was neutrally, because she said she did it neutrally, and there's no reason to disbelieve her, was tantamount to playing a video by Hitler neutrally. | ||
| Or Milo Yiannopoulos. | ||
| My comment on that has been that the radical leftists are so clueless that they can't even get their insults right. | ||
| I'm not Milo Yiannopoulos or Hitler. | ||
| It's like, no, sorry, it's one or the other. | ||
| You and I have been in this boat. | ||
| I think this boat has some people in it. | ||
| Yeah, this Hitler boat. | ||
| I mean, even right now, we know that someone's going to write about this and write that this was the gathering of the alt-right and all that other nonsense. | ||
| But in a weird way, do we owe the postmodernists some thanks then? | ||
| Because if you think about it, they forced someone like Lindsay to be public now, and I think she's wonderful and has, you know, just a tremendous intellect and all that. | ||
| People like Brett Weinstein getting shellacked. | ||
| Brett Weinstein. | ||
| I mean, my goodness. | ||
| Right, like all of these people, you guys, me, I mean, everyone added it. | ||
| James Damore. | ||
| I mean, he only is someone now with influence because they forced him to address these issues. | ||
| So in an odd way, we owe them. | ||
| I mean, for all the complaining that Well, the postmodernists had a point. | ||
| We owe them because they've sharpened, not only they've not only sharpened us intellectually, | ||
| but I think they've allowed all these other people to wake up. | ||
| Well, the postmodernists had a point. | ||
| Like the point is, is that the world is susceptible to a near infinite number of interpretations. | ||
| That happens to be true. | ||
| That's why developing artificial intelligence, especially perceptual systems, has turned out to be so difficult. | ||
| It's very, very difficult to perceive the world, because you can categorize it in, literally, a near-infinite number of ways. | ||
| Okay, and then the next claim was, well, it's very difficult to rank-order those ways in terms of quality. | ||
| It's like, yeah, that is very difficult. | ||
| But then they pushed it too far. | ||
| Therefore, there are no qualitative distinctions between modes of interpretation. | ||
| It's interpretation all the way down. | ||
| It's like, no, no. | ||
| Good point. | ||
| Hard to disagree with, but fundamentally wrong. | ||
| There's a finite set of viable interpretations. | ||
| The layman's term for that would be that some things are real, right? | ||
| I mean, is that the simplest way to say it? | ||
| There are some things that actually are real. | ||
| That's one objection. | ||
| Another objection is there are some modes of being that lead you to perdition very, very rapidly. | ||
| And that isn't somewhere, being human, that you actually want to go. | ||
| So there's the material reality that's outside the interpretive framework. | ||
| You know, but then there's an ethical reality that isn't material in the same simple sense, but there's an ethical reality that's also not merely a matter of interpretation. | ||
| I mean, the best example of that I know is Jack Panksepp's work with rats. | ||
| I mean, there's lots of models of this in the animal kingdom, but this one's particularly good. | ||
| So, juvenile rats like to wrestle. | ||
| So if you pair two rats together, two males, because they particularly like to wrestle, and one of them is 10% bigger than the other, the one with the 10% weight advantage can pin the little one. | ||
| Consistently. | ||
| Okay, so you pair them once, they'll work to do this, because they enjoy it. | ||
| The big one pins, he wins. | ||
| Now he's the dominant rat. | ||
| You think, well, there's dominance among rats. | ||
| Yeah, except that isn't how it works because rats in the wild live in social groups and they'll play with each other continually across many games. | ||
| So then let's say you pair the two rats together constantly. | ||
| Okay, after the first bout, the little rat, the loser, has to invite the big rat to play. | ||
| That's the rule. | ||
| So he does his little play maneuvers and the big rat thinks, yeah, yeah, okay, I'll play. | ||
| If you pair them repeatedly, unless the big rat lets the little rat win 30% of the time, the little rat will stop playing with them. | ||
| I read that, it just blew me away! | ||
| I thought, wow, look at that! | ||
| In rats, which have been used as a model for human behavior for psychologists for like 100 years, | ||
| in rats, there's an emergent ethic of fair play that emerges across iterated games. | ||
| It's like, really? | ||
| It's mind-boggling. | ||
| So we could use that, that would be an example of like when I'm playing basketball | ||
| with my eight-year-old nephew, I occasionally let him win. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I want to, because he needs that reward to keep going. | ||
| If I just beat him mercilessly. | ||
| Yeah, and if you're good, you let him win when he does something | ||
| particularly spectacular. | ||
| You push him. | ||
| There's this thing called the zone of proximal development. | ||
| And it turns out that adults speak to children naturally at a level that's slightly above their level of comprehension. | ||
| So that's the meaning zone, essentially. | ||
| And so you keep the kid there because the kid can talk but also learn at the same time. | ||
| And if you're really playing well with your eight-year-old nephew, you're going to let him win when he's pushing himself a little harder than he normally would. | ||
| And you think, well, that's He IS winning when he's doing that, and so you want to set up the game to reward him. | ||
| And that's an ethic that transcends mere interpretation. | ||
| It's not... It doesn't only apply to human beings. | ||
| It applies... And Franz De Waal, who studied chimpanzees, he's found quite clearly that it isn't the most tyrannical chimp who stays on top. | ||
| Because the chimp tyrant who has no friends, who does no mutual grooming, who's not reciprocal. | ||
| It's like he has an off day and two of his enemies tear him to pieces. | ||
| So the tyrant chimp sits atop a very unstable hierarchy. | ||
| And so I've thought too in the West, we don't have dominance hierarchies. | ||
| We have competence hierarchies, and those are completely different. | ||
| And you have to be a good player of iterated games to maintain your position in a competence hierarchy. | ||
| And that's the beginnings of a discussion about something like a fundamental ethic. | ||
| So that's interesting. | ||
| I think I can segue this to a little bit of the way that some of the media deals with you, is that you, because you are fact-based, you talk fast, you don't care. | ||
| I mean, you genuinely don't care about people's feelings. | ||
| I know you pretty well now. | ||
| You don't. | ||
| Outside of my immediate family. | ||
| Maybe your wife. | ||
| But they don't know how to respond to that then because they're used to dealing in a realm that is all about that. | ||
| So now you come out and you're like, no, no, no, no, this is the way it is. | ||
| I'll debate you, but you're not going to beat me just because you happen to be gay or a woman or whatever else it is. | ||
| And I think actually now that's a lot of the reason of your surge. | ||
| Well, I think that most people at root level don't actually want to think of themselves as their group identity first. | ||
| I think most people want to be respected on an individual level. | ||
| And so when I say, in order for you to be respected on an individual level, that means that I'm not going to respect you on the group level. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Meaning I'm not, that your group identity doesn't mean anything to me. | ||
| Your individual identity means everything to me, but your group identity means nothing to me. | ||
| And when I say individual identity, I don't mean how you identify, you know, in terms of race or gender. | ||
| I mean, in terms of your thought. | ||
| Are your thoughts interesting, or are they right, or are they wrong? | ||
| And they're either right or they're wrong, and they're interesting or they're not. | ||
| And that doesn't change based on who's saying it. | ||
| And if we could all get there, I think that's what people find appealing, is that if you can get there, then you can actually have a discussion about ideas. | ||
| If not, then you're just going to retreat into your identity, and there's no way for me to have a discussion with you. | ||
| I mean, I just had a talk at UConn, and one of the students got up and was talking about abortion. | ||
| Then she said, you know, I would never have an abortion, but you, as a white, privileged male, how could you talk about abortion? | ||
| And I said, because right is right and wrong is wrong, regardless of whether I am a white, privileged male. | ||
| I mean, that's the basis for Western civilization. | ||
| Otherwise, we can't have a conversation. | ||
| We can't do anything. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And then what happens if we can't have a conversation across groups? | ||
| Then we just fight for dominance. | ||
| That's exactly. | ||
| Well, and that's the postmodern worldview, is that that's all we're doing. | ||
| It's like, fine, but like, You're opening the door to the radical right-wingers because they're going to come in and say, okay, no problem, we'll play identity politics, but I'm not losing. | ||
| How's that? | ||
| It's like, well, that isn't the way you're supposed to play. | ||
| You're supposed to be guilty. | ||
| It's like, no, sorry, I'm not going to be guilty. | ||
| I'm just going to be dominant. | ||
| Exactly, this is the danger of the actual alt-right. | ||
| Because what the alt-right is, is it's a reactionary identity politics movement. | ||
| And the left doesn't want to acknowledge its own role in helping to drive the emergence of a reactionary identity politics movement. | ||
| Which, by the way, I find despicable, because I think all identity politics movements are despicable. | ||
| That's exactly what I think, too. | ||
| I don't care if it's right or left. | ||
| I did a year of shows on, if the left doesn't clean them, when I was still saying I'm on the left. | ||
| If we don't clean up our house, what is going to happen? | ||
| And look what has happened. | ||
| So shifting slightly a little bit, I thought this would be interesting. | ||
| Is there a criticism, actually I'll start with you first on this one. | ||
| Is there a criticism of you that you think is the most legit? | ||
| No criticism of me. | ||
| You know, I think that the The criticism of me that I think is legit is one that I think is probably common to most people, which is I tend to fall into confirmation bias, which is true for everybody. | ||
| So, you know, I think that, but, you know, when you're in the political realm, the easiest thing to do is to find evidence that supports your position and cherry pick the evidence in order to support that position. | ||
| And so if the idea is that I tend to do that, I try to fight that. | ||
| But I'll acknowledge that that's a flaw that I have, that when you're invested in a political fight, that your easiest mode of confrontation is to find stuff that supports what you already think, as opposed to taking in all of the available evidence and then shifting every point, as we were talking about before, toward the right position. | ||
| Because I think it is a weakness, it's something that I try to fight as often as possible. | ||
| And I try to make provision for that. | ||
| So before I ask you yours, what do you think is wrong with Ben? | ||
| A, what do you think is wrong with Ben? | ||
| And B, what do you think is psychologically the best way to deal with that? | ||
| To be aware, right? | ||
| You're being aware of what your issues, limitations are, what your biases might be. | ||
| But psychologically, what's the best way to... Oh, it's just surround yourself with competent people who Who have their areas of expertise that aren't yours, and to listen to them. | ||
| You know, and that's helped me over the last 15 months, because I've had about 10 people around me, 5 of them are family members, about 5 of them are friends, who are extraordinarily competent people, and they go over what I've been doing, and they don't pull any punches. | ||
| This feelings thing, this is something I'd like to spring to your defense about, because the rule, if you don't have an ethic, is don't hurt anyone's feelings. | ||
| It's like okay, but which feelings do you mean? | ||
| Do you mean like this second's feelings or do you mean the person's well-being across a year? | ||
| Because lots of times when you're having a firm discussion with someone that upsets them in the present | ||
| This happens with children all the time is your you're not taking stock of their feelings at the moment | ||
| Except insofar as you have to because you want to help prevent them from cascading into catastrophe for the rest | ||
| of their life It's like, well, I'm going to discipline you right now. | ||
| I'm going to tell you why you were wrong. | ||
| We're going to have a hard conversation. | ||
| Because if you keep that up, your life is going to be a never-ending stream of misery. | ||
| Well, that's not cruel. | ||
| And so, but because people don't see the ethic of iterated games, let's say, something like that, they say, well, you just shouldn't hurt anybody's feelings in the moment. | ||
| It's like, no. | ||
| Well, this is why I think both you and I object to the whole idea of the pleasure-pain matrix being the thing that matters in terms of human happiness. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because the bottom line is that you may be experiencing a good deal of pain right now, but that's going to lead to a more fulfilled life. | ||
| That's the utility of sacrifice. | ||
| Right. Everyone knows that give up something now in a rather painful way and you may benefit in the future | ||
| Yeah pain the pain pleasures ethic doesn't work because of the problem of time | ||
| And time and other people that's another reason that doesn't work | ||
| So it's yeah, you need a way more sophisticated solution to that. So so now let's turn that question to you | ||
| What do you think is the most legit criticism that you see? | ||
| Because I see a lot of blue check, you know, Twitter people with 5,000 followers just attacking you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Very rarely about your ideas. | ||
| Oh, they'll just make up something. | ||
| Jordan Peterson says dogs are blue and cats are green. | ||
| You know, and then somebody basically did that and I invited him on the show to talk to you and then of course he disappeared. | ||
| Well, I would say I have some problem with mood regulation, you know, and so sometimes I'm more irritable than I should be. | ||
| Sometimes I'm more... I come across... Well, no, I probably am more angry than is optimal in the circumstance, you know? | ||
| I mean, one of the rules of English common law, for example, is that you're more or less allowed to defend yourself with minimum necessary force. | ||
| And I've had to practice and practice and practice... | ||
| Not to use minimum necessary force. | ||
| You really want to hit him right now, don't you? | ||
| No, that is the temptation, I mean, no. | ||
| I think we all struggle with that. | ||
| I mean, there are certain times where somebody says something and it's like, oh, I just, oh. | ||
| I mean, there are certain questions that get asked and it's just a slow-pitched softball right down the center of the plate. | ||
| It's like, do I need to hit this softball as hard as I possibly can? | ||
| Yeah, well, it's especially rough if you have a sense of humor, too, because you think, Yes, zing! | ||
| But it's really useful, and I have learned this, it's really useful to not defend yourself too vociferously. | ||
| Which is weird, because you'd think, well, you have the right to defend yourself, like, no holds barred. | ||
| It's like, no, it actually doesn't work that way. | ||
| You have to defend yourself with minimal necessary force. | ||
| And I think I managed that in the Channel 4 interview, thank God. | ||
| But, I mean, believe me, people have been talking to me about that non-stop for 15 months, and I'm listening. | ||
| And, by the way, it wouldn't have worked as well if you hadn't done that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| If you'd just shellacked her. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you'd just gone right at her and said, what you are saying is so stupid for these five reasons, it would have been bad, I think. | ||
| I think so, too. | ||
| The fact that you sat there and you just said, no, you're asking good questions, and, you know, the fact that you're asking good questions demonstrates the invalidity of your entire viewpoint. | ||
| I mean, that was much more effective. | ||
| See, one of the things I've been meditating on for the last year is there's a line in the New Testament that says, resist not evil. | ||
| Okay, what the hell are you supposed to do with that line? | ||
| Because it's really a difficult thing to figure out. | ||
| Do you really mean that? | ||
| You don't resist evil? | ||
| Well, there's a couple of problems. | ||
| If you punch back, then you have a fight. | ||
| But you can't just Not defend yourself like weakly you can't be weak and not defend yourself, but you can be strong and Defend yourself minimally and that's a real art like that's that's the essence of sophistication I would say and like I'm not you know, I come from kind of a rough place. | ||
| I've come from northern Alberta I come from the frontier, you know And my town was scraped out of the bloody prairie 50 years before people moved before before I lived there. | ||
| And so it's it's been an It's been a continual challenge to adjust my sophistication to the level of challenge, and I'm trying to do that, but I don't always manage it. | ||
| Yeah, so to that point, do you think that we sometimes actually, at a deep level, use identity politics against ourselves in this regard? | ||
| So you're sitting across from Kathy, she's female. | ||
| At some level, do you think you maybe moderated it because of that? | ||
| Because had it been a male, and you talk about this often, that we have to act differently towards males and females, and there's physical reasons for that and biological reasons for that, but that had she been a male, say the same exact age from you, from Alberta, and all of that, that perhaps your response might have been a little more forceful. | ||
| Even though we're all agreeing your response was done correctly and even-handedly. | ||
| Well, it's hard to say, but probably yes. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Well, because I don't think that you can say that you fight with a woman the same way that you fight with a man. | ||
| That doesn't mean you can't fight with a woman. | ||
| It doesn't mean you shouldn't. | ||
| But I don't think the rules are the same. | ||
| Now, why are the rules different? | ||
| Well, some of the rules are there's a physical limit that's much more stringent. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, there's a level of Hinting at physical threat that you can bring to bear in a conversation between men that you cannot bring to bear in a conversation with a woman so and the mechanics of that are very very subtle and difficult and it's especially challenging in an intellectual discussion because an Intellectual discussion is a kind of war and it isn't obvious how men and women should go to war with one another We don't know we don't know how to sort that out | ||
| My sense has been, on the panels that I've done, is that I definitely have to pull my punches if I'm on a panel with women. | ||
| It doesn't mean that I don't... It doesn't mean that it's any less challenging intellectually, but the strategy and the attitude has to be different. | ||
| It's much more likely that you'll be seen as a bully if you bring the same force to bear on a female opponent as you would On a male opponent. | ||
| Yeah, so I wonder if you're... Rick Lazio and Hillary Clinton is a perfect example of this in the political sphere. | ||
| You remember back in 2000, Hillary was running for Senate in New York, and Rick Lazio walked across the stage and asked her to sign a piece of paper. | ||
| And people, like the headlines were that he basically assaulted her, right? | ||
| Or if Rick Lazio had walked across the stage from another man and said, sign this piece of paper, it would have been like, what a tough guy, look at that. | ||
| He's just willing to stand up to him. | ||
| So I suspect in that case, your answer to this question is no, you would treat people the same. | ||
| If Piers Morgan that night had been female, you would have done the exact same thing. | ||
| Well, I mean, I was actually relatively polite to Piers. | ||
| So to me, I try to be as polite as possible, unless the person is being very impolite, in which case I'm happy to go impolite. | ||
| So I try to, instead of trying to gauge sort of the, probably we're doing the same thing just from different directions, instead of trying to, you know, determine how I engage with the person by all of the various, you know, I let them take the first punch basically. | ||
| You take the first step in the waltz and then I'll respond in kind. | ||
| So if you want to act polite, then I'm happy to act polite. | ||
| I'm with you, and I'm happy to have a nice cordial conversation. | ||
| If you wanna get nasty, then we'll get nasty, and we'll do that, and I prep for interviews. | ||
| So I'm happy, if you wanna go in the mud, I'm happy to go in the mud. | ||
| We can do that. | ||
| Yeah, so I wanna circle back to something related to religion that I wanted to get to earlier, but we're doing a lot here. | ||
| Do you think there's any difference, or do you both think there's any difference, Ben's belief in, or Ben's Jewish, and your belief is Christian? | ||
| Comes from the Christian tradition. | ||
| Does that matter at all? | ||
| Whatever differences there are in that little place where you're both saying, you know, we see the reasons why our morals and ethics and all that come from this, we're also acknowledging, you know, the real world and biology and all of those things, whatever differences you may have, which I don't even know that any of the three of us know what those differences are, do they even matter? | ||
| They might. | ||
| That would be a lovely thing to have a discussion about. | ||
| I'd love to figure out if there are. | ||
| For me, it depends on the brand of religion that a person is espousing. | ||
| So let's just do this with you two. | ||
| I'm writing a book on this right now, actually. | ||
| There are certain principles that obviously undergird Christianity that are from the Judaic tradition, clearly. | ||
| It's like a manifestation of the prophetic tradition, essentially. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's essentially an attempt to merge Jerusalem with Athens is, I think, the Book of John is the most obvious example, using the logos as sort of the unifying feature, and writing the whole thing in Greek, right? | ||
| I mean, that was not the lingua franca of the time. | ||
| That was not what people were speaking, except in educated circles. | ||
| So, all the Judaic principles, things like a God involved in history, a God who cares about individuals, the notion that you have a choice between good and evil, so choose good, and that and so that you will live long on the earth right | ||
| the all these things were taken forward into Christianity the major distinctions | ||
| in terms of Christianity versus Judaism are the idea that and again it | ||
| depends on your interpretation of Christianity early Christianity sort of | ||
| suggested that history had ended with Christ and then in later kind of | ||
| iterations of Christianity that was moved beyond right | ||
| It wasn't that history had ended, it was that Christ would come back when history had reached its logical progression. | ||
| The progression of history didn't end, but original messianism was, this is the Messiah, we're done, right? | ||
| History's over. | ||
| It was a millennialist religion. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| That's what, very few people think that now. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So this is why I'm trying to distinguish, you know, brands of Christianity, because obviously there are serious differences even in Basic root level between Catholicism and Calvinism and Lutheranism and all these things have different iterations So, you know my very strong belief in free will and my actual building of a moral system in Judaism's building moral system on the notion of free Will obviously runs directly counter to for example Calvinism right Calvinism suggests that free will is is chimerical and there's no basis for it and That God grants you grace based on what he wants to do So it depends on on the brand of Christianity But I think that overall the conflict between Christianity and Judaism | ||
| In large measure, especially in the early conflict, was political rather than ideological in a lot of ways. | ||
| It was a new religion attempting to establish its own footing and was angry that Jews would not join this new religion and leave behind tradition. | ||
| I think there are certain ways in which Christianity You know, like, for example, the main distinction between Christianity and Judaism that people usually make is that Christianity is a grace-based religion and Judaism is an acts-based religion, meaning that Judaism says you sort of earn your way into heaven, right? | ||
| You earn your way toward a better life. | ||
| And Christianity says if you believe, right, I'm the way, the truth, and the life, if you believe, then you're good. | ||
| But the truth is that Christianity There's this weird paradoxical relationship between the idea of belief in Christianity, the belief that Christ came to save everyone from their sins, and that all you have to do is admit that and you're redeemed. | ||
| There's symbolic truth to that that would take a long time to unpack, but there's also an injunction that goes along with that to imitate Christ in your life. | ||
| I feel like a lot of these distinctions are almost, some of them are almost a little false. | ||
| I mean, meaning that they're either Christian misreads of Judaism or Jewish misreads of Christianity. | ||
| And that when you get to the root of it, I mean, this is what Maimonides says, that there are significant differences between Judaism and Christianity. | ||
| But his view of Christianity from a Jewish historical point of view is that Judaism was never bound to convert billions of people around the world. | ||
| But Christianity was specifically because we have a lot of crap we got to do. | ||
| I mean, Jews have, we have 613 commandments. | ||
| You know, we have to keep kosher, we have to do all of these things. | ||
| I appreciate you doing a lot of them for me. | ||
| Yeah, no problem. | ||
| I'm taking care of it. | ||
| I'll transfer over the points in the afterlives. | ||
| I'll give you one of my afterlives. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But I think that Christianity ends up doing a lot of those same things that, you know, | ||
| there were supposed to be stark distinctions just under different guys. | ||
| So when it comes to, this is why in the modern world, when the discrimination between, you know, from Christians toward Jews largely has ended, I think that what you're seeing is this tremendous confluence between particularly Orthodox Jews and observant Christians on matters of values. | ||
| Because once Christianity in the late 20th century, in the mid 20th century, | ||
| and in America more broadly with Christianity, because American Christianity is very different | ||
| than European Christianity. | ||
| Once there was an idea that Jews were not the enemy to be converted, but were maybe you still wanna convert me, | ||
| but we're not gonna come at you with a knife, we're gonna come at you with a book. | ||
| And that we share a common framework for how the world is supposed to work. | ||
| You just may not agree with the second half of the book. | ||
| Then I think that that's created a pretty good working relationship. | ||
| This is why I'm struggling to come up with what are the significant differences. | ||
| And so I need a Christian to tell me what is the significant difference so I can argue with it. | ||
| Because I know my own religion better than I know Christianity. | ||
| My question has been, I don't know if the role that the state plays in Judaism and Christianity is the same. | ||
| Because I'm not sure what to make of the, like, what I would say is the Jews put a tremendous amount of emphasis on the state as a mechanism for salvation. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| That might be the symbolic idea that underlies the establishment of Israel. | ||
| And I would say that in Christianity... You mean the nation or you mean like the government? | ||
| I mean the nation, but then it gets tangled up with the government. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is a distinction, that Christianity is a universalistic religion. | ||
| The idea is that in the kingdom of God, everyone is Christian, basically. | ||
| And Judaism is not in one sense, but it is in another, which is that God identifies a nation that he treasures as his own, and he has a special relationship with that nation, but Judaism's not exclusivist with regard to who gets into heaven. | ||
| So there's this basic idea in Genesis that there are commandments that are given prior to the giving of the Torah. | ||
| There's what we call the Sheva Mitzvot B'nei Noach, the seven commandments that are given to the sons of Noah, meaning all mankind. | ||
| And these are things like no murder, no idolatry, no adultery. | ||
| They basically mirror a lot of the Ten Commandments. | ||
| And so the idea in Judaism is that God—it's almost like a priestly case. | ||
| God chose this specific group of people to be a light unto the nations by demonstrating what a godly lifestyle looks like if you dedicate every aspect of your life to God. | ||
| And then he said to everybody else, I know not everybody else is up to this, and in fact, Jews are supposed to try and turn away converts, but if you—but You can still get into heaven. | ||
| The idea that we are trying to force anyone into being Jewish, that's not a thing. | ||
| So nationalism without the conversion... Well, you can think about that psychologically as an attempt to both manage the preservation of group identity. | ||
| So that would be culture, a cultural identity, which has some utility. | ||
| and also to be able to coexist with others who are doing things in a different way. | ||
| And again, Judaism has had a long history of, just like every other religion, of sort of evolution on this stuff. | ||
| Like when you read the book of Joshua, there's actual forced conversion that happens in the book of Joshua. | ||
| But by the time you get to early Christianity and midpoint Judaism, right, | ||
| because Judaism is a lot older than Christianity, then you're already talking about Jews who are not looking | ||
| to convert people. | ||
| They sort of want to live in their own state. | ||
| They don't want to bother anyone else for the most part. | ||
| So the idea of like a tidal wave of conquering Jews going out, I mean, even to think about it now is hilarious, right? | ||
| Nobody thinks about it that way, except if you're a conspiratorial nutbag. | ||
| The inquisitions usually work the other way. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So anything that you might have heard Ben just say, would anything jive with a fundamental belief that you have that would cause a problem? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like cause a problem in society. | ||
| Well, I think that one potential problem that's worth discussing, but it would take forever to discuss it, is the relative role of the individual versus the state. | ||
| I mean, you see this Argued out in the prophetic books and in the Old Testament. | ||
| Yes I mean there's the Jewish state and it's it's sort of the the central player in some sense But there's clear evidence that it can become corrupt it can fall away and that a prophet who's an individual has to step forward and we Revivify it right and so there's tremendous emphasis on the utility of the individual you see that in Judea Judaism. | ||
| I would say Overall, it's it's a it's a very cohesive It promotes in-group cohesion, let's say, but it also allows for individual expression in very interesting ways, because there's tremendous emphasis in Jewish culture on learning and articulation and mastery of ideas, and so that provides this space for the individual to flourish. | ||
| With Christianity, you see more of a move away, I would say, from the idea of the state. | ||
| Now, that's not necessarily without its troubles. | ||
| One of the things Jung pointed out was, well, as Christianity becomes more about the individual, the religion itself tends to fragment, like it did with Protestantism, until it just fragments right to the point where every individual is their own church. | ||
| And then you have no continuity and no tradition. | ||
| And the Catholics were kind of a bulwark against that. | ||
| But I do think that there's a discussion to be had about the relative role of the individual in redeeming the world, let's say, versus the state in redeeming the world. | ||
| And I would say the Christians come down more strongly on the side of the individual, and the Jews come down more strongly on the side of the state. | ||
| Now, I'm willing to be corrected about that, because I've never actually been able to have a discussion with anyone about that. | ||
| So, I don't know what you think about that. | ||
| I think there's some truth to that. | ||
| I mean, I think the idea of, you know, in Hebrew, Am Yisrael, like the idea of the nation of Israel being paramount. | ||
| When you pray, you pray in collective terms. | ||
| You don't pray in individual terms. | ||
| Everything is done in terms of anachna, in terms of we praying as a group, right? | ||
| You're supposed to pray in a minion. | ||
| So how do you both square that away? | ||
| In your own ways, how do you square that away as someone that believes in the individual? | ||
| Because there's a lot of play in the joints. | ||
| There's a lot of play in the joints, meaning that, so for example, to take the most obvious example, if you want to talk about the power of the Jewish state in sort of biblical context, there's tremendous argument between whether a kingship is a good thing or a kingship is a bad thing in the Old Testament, right? | ||
| It says, like Samuel warns the Jewish people, Mm hmm. | ||
| if you take a king, here's what's going to happen. | ||
| It's all going to suck. | ||
| And then they form a kingship and things suck. | ||
| And so there's a strong case to be made that kingship was not | ||
| actually what was wanted because you have an entire period of | ||
| just judges and the judges are legitimately just individuals | ||
| who are trusted by the people, but then they can be supplanted at any time by another judge who's not from the lineage. | ||
| So, you know, so when we say that that group identity matters in Judaism, it matters to the extent that you're | ||
| following God's law. | ||
| But if you stray away from that, the idea I think Judaism has | ||
| always said that what you do is what makes you part of the group, not what you are. | ||
| So Judaism has a weird dichotomy in it that's largely driven by exigent circumstances, which is the | ||
| idea of biological Judaism versus the idea of religious Judaism. | ||
| So I care very little about biological Judaism. | ||
| Like when somebody says, such and such is Jewish. | ||
| Noam Chomsky is Jewish. | ||
| I really don't care. | ||
| And I think that most Orthodox Jews, basically biological Judaism, or your mom was Jewish, which is the way that it works in Orthodox Judaism, is sort of the entry ticket to being Jewish. | ||
| Meaning you have to either have converted in, or your mom has to be Jewish in order for you to become fully Jewish. | ||
| But the practice is what matters to me more than anything else. | ||
| And that's where you get back into grace-based versus acts-based a little bit, right? | ||
| Well, it's also, that's another place where the... | ||
| the group identity issue becomes paramount. | ||
| It's like, well, there's this group, well, how is membership defined? | ||
| Well, let's say it's defined by ethnicity, something like that, which would be related | ||
| to the descent through the mother. | ||
| It's like, well, that's a problem. | ||
| I'm not saying it's wrong. | ||
| I'm saying it's a problem because it demarcates a group. | ||
| You say, well, this is a group that only we can belong to. | ||
| But what's weird is you can convert in. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So this is why I say when there's play in the joints, a lot of the problems are solvable through the idea that you can convert in. | ||
| So Judaism says you can't convert out, but then we don't punish people who leave, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is different than Islam. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes, it's actually relatively important. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I want to point out. | ||
| But, I mean, one of the people who I work with at my company, Andrew Klavan, is a guy who was born Jewish and now is Christian. | ||
| In my view, he's Jewish, but am I going to drag him down to my synagogue? | ||
| That's not a thing. | ||
| The one thing I will say for group identity is that what we have seen is that if there is lack of group identity, that group identity is filled usually by nefarious groups. | ||
| Meaning that people do have a necessity. | ||
| The idea of existing, that you find your meaning, or you find your purpose, or you find your identity just in yourself as an individual, is not only wrong, it's belied by virtually all of human history. | ||
| Careful, you're going to make an argument for identity politics. | ||
|
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Right, exactly. | |
| Well, that's why I wanted to ask this question. | ||
| But the point, but what Judaism does, what America does, it says find your identity in the ideas. | ||
| Right, that's the difference. | ||
| This is why I say I don't care about biological Judaism. | ||
| You know, particularly. | ||
| I care much more about the ideas that you hold. | ||
| So, I'm in favor of group identity if group identity is built around a set of ideas that are worth preserving. | ||
| I'm not in favor of group identity if, like, I am a conservative. | ||
| That's a group identity. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that's an identifier more than it's an identity. | ||
| Meaning it's a way of identifying me as a person who thinks this way. | ||
| And because I think there are differences in modes of thought, then those group identities do matter. | ||
| I mean, this is why we get together. | ||
| This is why we have discussions. | ||
| This is why we have friends. | ||
| This is why we have families. | ||
| But I'm glad you said that the way you did, because I try to challenge myself on that all the time, because I talk about the individual, I believe in the individual, and I want to make sure that I'm not occasionally going back. | ||
| But if we can find commonality, and this is what I think is one of the things that's broken down, is we used to have a common purpose. | ||
| I have this framework that I'm working on in the book that I'm writing, where I basically say that in order for an individual to be happy, You need four things. | ||
| You need individual purpose. | ||
| You need individual capacity, like a feeling that you can accomplish that purpose or at least make moves in that direction. | ||
| You need a communal purpose. | ||
| You do need to feel like you're part of a group that's moving in the right direction. | ||
| And you need communal capacity, which both allows the community to activate together and also protects your rights as an individual to do what you want to do in pursuit of your individual purpose. | ||
| And that's the apotheosis of happiness, and that's what I think the Founding Fathers were trying to do in the United States, for example, set up a framework where you could fulfill all of these things. | ||
| But you do need the idea of communal purpose. | ||
| And one of the things that's happened post-Enlightenment is that people don't even think in terms of, they either think purely in terms of communal purpose or not at all in terms of communal purpose. | ||
| So they think either purely in terms of communal purpose, and that's identity politics, meaning I'm black, therefore the black community should do X. | ||
| Right, or I'm Jewish, therefore the Jewish community should do X. And then there are people who think not in terms of communal purpose at all, meaning full-on libertarian, I make my own meaning, we don't have to have anything in common. | ||
| And that's a lie. | ||
| Even libertarians believe we have to have an idea of liberty in common. | ||
| Okay, so here's how the Christian drama looks to me. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, harmoniously. | ||
| And when we don't have any sort of communal purpose, and we live with a bunch of people | ||
| with whom we share nothing, then it falls apart incredibly quickly. | ||
| Okay, so here's how the Christian drama looks to me. | ||
| It addresses this issue, right? | ||
| So Christ is presented as a figure who's an absolute master of his tradition, right? | ||
| He's debating with the Jewish elders when he's 12. | ||
| So, think about it psychologically. | ||
| First, you're a child, and you're dependent on your parents. | ||
| And then you have to make the move from being a child dependent into the world. | ||
| But you don't move from child to individual. | ||
| You move from child to group. | ||
| That's your teenage gang. | ||
| That's your adolescence. | ||
| You have to catalyze your group identity. | ||
| If you don't have a group identity, it's actually a developmental failure. | ||
| Right? | ||
| But then you might think, well, wait a second. | ||
| Group identity is necessary, but is it the highest It doesn't represent the highest plane of moral achievement the answer that is no you have to emerge from your group as an individual Okay, so now this is how I read the Christian story symbolically, and this is a consequence mostly of having stood studied young He said look | ||
| You need group identity. | ||
| That's the persona that you wear. | ||
| You have to have a persona. | ||
| You have to be able to wear a suit. | ||
| You have to simplify yourself for other people. | ||
| You have to be able to play the game. | ||
| Otherwise, you just have failed developmentally. | ||
| But if you're only a persona, then that's a big problem. | ||
| Partly because when the group goes insane, so do you. | ||
| Now, you've got to emerge out of the group. | ||
| Okay, so now you need a symbol for what emerges out of the group. | ||
| Okay, so Christ is the symbol of what should emerge out of the group, speaking psychologically. | ||
| Bear the tragedy of life. | ||
| Speak the truth. | ||
| Be willing to transform through death. | ||
| That's the rules. | ||
| Now, I'm speaking purely psychologically. | ||
| You learn something new. | ||
| You learn it. | ||
| It makes you suffer. | ||
| The part of you that's wrong has to die. | ||
| You have to let go of that. | ||
| And it's hard. | ||
| Especially, maybe you learn something profound. | ||
| It's like you have to regrow an arm. | ||
| It's really painful. | ||
| You know, but you identify with the part of yourself that transforms through voluntary acceptance of suffering | ||
| And that's what Christ represents as a symbol. And I think that that's I think that that's correct symbolically | ||
| This is what actually severed the relationship between Jung and Freud by the way because Jung | ||
| laid out his understanding of Christianity in those terms and | ||
| Freud it wasn't a Jewish Christian thing, you know, because Freud was really he was Jewish by ethnicity | ||
| That's right. No, not at all. He just didn't want to have anything to do with religious ideation at all | ||
| He thought that that would introduce he called it like a tidal wave a black tidal wave of | ||
| Occultism back into what he regarded as a science. He had his point, but I think Jung got the symbolic structure, | ||
| right? | ||
| And so, what does that mean in relationship to Christianity and Judaism? | ||
| Well, it's really complicated, because you have the prophetic tradition in Judaism, and the prophets are also symbols of people who emerge from the pathological group, who step forward courageously, and who reconstitute the group. | ||
| So, you believe these people could exist right now? | ||
| Which people? | ||
| The prophets. | ||
| I think prophets of sorts exist always. | ||
| I think Dostoevsky was a prophet. | ||
| Nietzsche was clearly a prophet. | ||
| I mean, he predicted what was going to happen in the 20th century. | ||
| Can you imagine predicting what's going to happen in the 21st century? | ||
| Well, the reason I ask it like that is because I think when you say prophets, I think people think of someone coming down from heaven and they're going to have a halo. | ||
| I actually fully agree with this. | ||
| In fact, so does Maimonides. | ||
| I mean, Maimonides has an entire section in Guide for the Perplexed about prophecy. | ||
| And what he says is there's Moses-level prophecy, which is the legislating prophet. | ||
| And he says he's the only legislating prophet in the Jewish view. | ||
| But all the other prophets are just people who see things incredibly clearly, essentially. | ||
| They're people who have studied philosophy and who have studied human morality and have studied the human being. | ||
| And they're way down on the iceberg. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's the thing that makes them different. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And so in that sense, people who, predicting the, the thing about, you know, providing a certain level of stability for folks and we're, you know, I think, I think there are levels of prophecy is what I'll say. | ||
| And I think that the better you are at recognizing human behavior and the interplay of forces, the better you are at saying, okay, here's what's going to happen next week. | ||
| I think it's very difficult for anybody to say, here's what's going to happen in a hundred years, because if you could predict that, you'd make a lot in the stock market. | ||
| But I think that you could certainly, you know, as you... Well, you can also get a sense of plate tectonics. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Like the details rub out, but like, and I think that's where we're at now. | ||
| Like, I believe we're in, we are in a war of ideas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're at a point where we're debating the validity of postmodernism. | ||
| Now, and that's tainted with Neo-Marxism, and that should have been laid to rest a hundred years ago, but was it? | ||
| We're trying! | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, because that just... I mean, the reason that postmodernists can't let go of Neo-Marxism is because there's no impetus forward in postmodernism. | ||
| That's its fundamental flaw. | ||
| It's like, well, there's no grand narrative. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| Like, what are you going to do tomorrow? | ||
| Well, I don't know, because everything's the same as everything else. | ||
| It's like, well, you cannot live that way. | ||
| It's impossible to live that way. | ||
| Well, we'll just sneak some Marxism in the back door. | ||
| It's like, well, that's prima facie evidence, in my estimation, that your philosophy is pragmatically lacking. | ||
| Even though you can make a perfectly coherent case for it, it's like you can't live it out. | ||
| You just can't do it. | ||
| So you have to sneak in this pathological Marxism in the back door. | ||
| Well, no, that just invalidates your entire system. | ||
| But apart from all that, I think the postmodern objection to meaning is actually | ||
| wrong. | ||
| Well, we talked about this earlier. | ||
| I do believe that there's a transcendent ethic. | ||
| And I do believe that it touches on the metaphysical. | ||
| I believe that people experience that because people are perfectly capable of having | ||
| unutterably profound religious experiences. | ||
| And the naturalistic materialists don't know what the hell to do with that. | ||
| They have no idea what to do with that fact. | ||
| They say, well, it's delusional. | ||
| It's like, well, hang on a sec. | ||
| People who have those experiences appear to be more successful and healthier. | ||
| It's like, so exactly in what manner is that delusional? | ||
| And if you induce it in the lab with psilocybin, for example, among people who are dying of cancer, their fear of death goes away. | ||
| You're going to just lay that out there as delusional, are you? | ||
| Quit smoking! | ||
| 85% success rate with one mystical experience on psilocybin produces 85% cessation rate in smoking. | ||
| It's completely... And with MDMA, ecstasy, the three treatments with MDMA, that's what the current research indicates, produces a 72% cure rate for intractable post-traumatic stress disorder. | ||
| It's like, those are miracle cures, and they have to be accompanied by the mystical experience. | ||
| No one knows how to account for that. | ||
| And so, there is a transcendent ethic. | ||
| So it's a very physical thing. | ||
| I mean, in a case like that, you talk about ayahuasca or any of these things, right? | ||
| You're eating something, you're ingesting something, smoking it, whatever it is. | ||
| It's physical, it's here and now, but the experience is metaphysical. | ||
| Sure, that's a place where the biological and the transcendent touch, and we don't know what to make of that. | ||
| Well, that's why psychedelics threw our whole culture into such a... | ||
| Flip this upside down. No one knew what to do with them You know, I mean the indians regarded psilocybin as food of | ||
| the gods for a reason and when people have encountered psychedelic substances | ||
| Throughout human history. That's always how they've been characterized. That's right food of the gods | ||
| it's like beware of them, but they're they open the door to the transcendent and | ||
| well I think the evidence that they are doing something that | ||
| psychedelic substances are doing something that we seriously don't understand at all | ||
| Not a bit is overwhelming rick strassman wrote a book on his experiences giving dmt to a whole bunch of people down | ||
| in He was at in austin I think and | ||
| Strassman's a pretty straight scientist. You know, he was interested in measuring | ||
| psychophysiological responses to the drugs. Well, he'd give people DMT and they | ||
| all came back with the same story. I was blasted out of my consciousness. I went, I | ||
| met a whole bunch of alien beings. They were really surprised I was there and | ||
| then I came back and it was the most real thing that's ever happened to me. | ||
| And Strassman would say, well, you know, well, you had a Jungian archetypal experience, or it was a dream, and they'd say, you don't understand. | ||
| And he got so distraught because of these continual reports that he had to stop doing the research. | ||
| And like, I'm not making a claim for anything metaphysical here, but I'm definitely pointing out that there are undeniable realms of human experience that involve | ||
| religious experience and a sense of the infinite transcendent that look like they're | ||
| healthy and that you cannot deny | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, so what are you supposed to do with that? | ||
| Well, you put it in a box and you say, well, we're not going to pay attention to it. | ||
| It's like, that's not going to work. | ||
| Yeah, that's not going to work. | ||
| And I've done a lot of those things that you just mentioned and virtually always had good experiences on them. | ||
| Now, as someone that I'm pretty sure has never smoked weed, you haven't eaten mushrooms, you haven't done MDMA. | ||
| and all that stuff. | ||
| Yeah, apparently he'll take a drink, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I've done all of those things. | ||
| I don't really do, well, I mean, I smoke some weed, but I don't, I'm not doing, I haven't done ecstasy in years, | ||
| and mushrooms I did do about a year ago, and I had a great day, and I kind of wandered around, | ||
| and I thought, you know, I felt some things happening. | ||
| I didn't, when I did them in college, I had a couple of those type of transcendent feeling. | ||
| I was just part of something, whatever. | ||
| So when you hear all this, as someone that doesn't partake in any of this stuff, what do you make of that? | ||
| That people can perhaps use some substances that you're not down with on a personal level | ||
| to get to a place that I think you actually think Yeah, I mean, I think the answer is that it depends on, you know, the level of expertise of the person using it is what I would suggest. | ||
| You know, the idea, like, I'm not against prescription medication. | ||
| So if you're talking about, you know, an actual program that's going to better somebody's life, That's one thing. | ||
| But if it's somebody who's just, I want to have a religious experience, let me pop some LSD, then there's some serious downsides to drugs that I do wonder if it is necessary. | ||
| Well, two things. | ||
| One, in Judaism, and I keep reverting back to this because I know it's the religion I know, but there's two kind of schools of thought with regard to Judaism. | ||
| One are called the misnagdim. | ||
| These are people who are sort of enlightenment mentality, hard science folks, and then the chassidim. | ||
| And the chassidim are the people who see for the Chabad. | ||
| They have the big beards and they have the peyas, and they like to dance and they drink on Purim and all this. | ||
| And they're wonderful people. | ||
| They do great outreach specifically because they're so spiritual. | ||
| And I tend to be more of a snaged than a chassid, meaning that I try to get to my- | ||
| I would like to see you dance. | ||
| Oh, it's not pretty. | ||
| It's- But I try to get to spirituality through reason as opposed to through experience. | ||
| Simply because I think that, well, I know people who have had religious experience and it's really changed them. | ||
| I think there are also a lot of people who have religious experience and it lasts for a given amount of time and then they're done with the religious experience and they just go back to doing whatever they're doing, right? | ||
| I mean, this is what you were doing in college. | ||
| So, I think that if you're looking for that as a gateway out of whatever it is that is troubling you in terms of a lack of purpose, like a permanent solution, maybe that works for a small number of people, but I highly doubt that most people can find a level of purpose necessary to drive the entirety of the rest of their lives outside of a framework of conscious will, moving them in the direction of doing the right thing. | ||
| Jung told people, he talked about mescaline and LSD in the context of Huxley's introduction of those substances into the Western world. | ||
| And he said two things in his inimitably wise manner. | ||
| The first thing he said is, beware of unearned wisdom. | ||
| It's like, yeah, man, that's great. | ||
| And he also said, you have to be very careful about entering the realm of the gods, because you end up with a responsibility that might be more crushing than you can tolerate. | ||
| And it's the same kind of idea. | ||
| And I thought, I've never read anyone who wrote wiser words about the dangers of psychedelic use than that. | ||
| Because he didn't say, well, none of this is real. | ||
| He said, it's more real than you want it to be. | ||
| And so watch the hell out. | ||
| And I think that's extremely good advice. | ||
| And it is very difficult for people to integrate those experiences into their life. | ||
| Although my experience with people has been... | ||
| And I've seen this with lots of people. | ||
| They've said that they've done mushrooms, for example, had a mystical experience, and that that provided them | ||
| with a moral compass that they lacked before that never went away. | ||
| And I've talked to many people who've had that experience. | ||
| But I've also been in Amsterdam watching the 50-year-old punk rockers | ||
| trip out on mushrooms and beer and go pound out some street kid. | ||
| There's the downside of transcendence is something that's not to be trifled with. | ||
| And there's also the opportunity not to go to heaven, but to go to hell. | ||
| And that does happen to people, and that can induce post-traumatic stress disorder, | ||
| essentially. | ||
| So beware of... | ||
| Beware of wandering in realms that you're not competent to wander in. | ||
| Yeah, that's my central take. | ||
| And I think it's really good for you. | ||
| Like, I think that what you're doing really works, because, you know, you do kind of what I did with the biblical lectures, except you take it to an even greater extreme, I would say. | ||
| You're so rational in your approach. | ||
| Like, people know that you have a religious overview, let's say. | ||
| But you don't use that. | ||
| You use it less than I do, I would say. | ||
| And I think it really works well for you. | ||
| I think it's very effective. | ||
| I mean, I think it's hard to force faith on people, and I think it's wrong to force faith on people. | ||
| Well, it's probably also counterproductive. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| And I'm not preaching that you have to agree with how I got to these values to say that these values are necessary for the civilization. | ||
| I mean, this is essentially what I said to Sam when I was debating him, is, you know, he said, well, you know, a lot of religious people, he sort of suggested that I, you know, think that atheists can't be moral people, and I said, I don't think that that's true at all. | ||
| I mean, the point that I'm making is, You have to get to these values to have a civilization. | ||
| How you get to those values, in my view, you know, I think requires a leap of faith. | ||
| You can make that leap of faith a variety of different ways, but you're going to end up needing these central values at root if you're going to build a civilization off of that. | ||
| So whether you do that through, you know, the kind of method that Sam wants to get to. | ||
| What was weird is that, you know, Sam and I come from completely different perspectives on virtually everything, but we share probably 90 to 95 percent of our values. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And so what I would suggest is that those values are rooted in a Judeo-Christian civilization | ||
| that is mixed with a Greek civilization that brought us to the same place | ||
| because we grew up five miles from each other. | ||
| So of course we have the same values. | ||
| Right, his counter argument to that basically would be that you're really talking about | ||
| enlightenment values, but you would say those values ultimately came from Judeo-Christian values | ||
| before that. | ||
| The funny thing about that is that's actually a silly argument, that those are enlightenment values. | ||
| Well, I hope you guys will talk about this when you're on stage together in a couple weeks, right? | ||
| I think the biologists have already made It's like Sam can't be an evolutionary biologist and say that the values that run Western civilization sprang from the Enlightenment. | ||
| It's like you don't get to have those two time frames at the same time. | ||
| I disagree with you a little bit about the atheist issue because I think this is the reason it's like if you think about the layers of the mind with the iceberg analogy it's like well you've got your your your your patterns of action and then you've got your justification for those patterns of action you might think that those are rational but but then there's something underneath that which is like the images that represent reality, and the stories that | ||
| represent reality, and then there's something underneath that even. | ||
| And I think that to be religious is to have all of those things in order simultaneously. | ||
| And I don't think that you can have an ethic that's only grounded in rationality, | ||
| because I think the integrity of that rationality depends on the integrity of stories that you don't understand that | ||
| exist. | ||
| So let me rephrase, because I actually agree with everything you just said. | ||
| When I say that we have to agree on these values in order for us to build a civilization, how you get there is your own business. | ||
| I mean on an individual level. | ||
| I don't mean that every way you get to those values is equally valid. | ||
| Otherwise, Sam and I would agree, right? | ||
| I do not think that the mode of thinking from evolutionary biology to the values that I think are necessary for building a civilization I see weaknesses coming up in Sam's representations for these reasons. | ||
| The first thing is he has to dispense with consciousness, and he has to dispense with free will. | ||
| And I actually think that's deeply problematic. | ||
| And I think the reason he has to do that, and Dennett does it too, is because there is something metaphysically strange about consciousness. | ||
| And you can't allow for that if you're a reductionist materialist. | ||
| And so I'm more than willing to say, look, I don't understand consciousness at all. | ||
| And the more I think about it, the less I understand it, because it seems to be the linchpin of being. | ||
| Without consciousness, there's no being. | ||
| You could say, well, the material reality continues. | ||
| It's like, well, maybe and maybe not, because we do not understand the relationship between time and space and consciousness. | ||
| So it's not self-evident that what you're saying is true. | ||
| It might be true, but even if it was true, well, exactly how does the universe that has no consciousness in it exist? | ||
| Like, how do you parameterize it? | ||
| Does it have a duration? | ||
| Does it have a size? | ||
| Does it have any qualities? | ||
| Like, what is it? | ||
| It's like a video game that no one's playing. | ||
| It's like, well, what is that exactly? | ||
| Well, this is where we get to, you know, back to that three-hour conversation that you and Sam had as to the nature of truth and what exactly truth is. | ||
| And one of the things that I always... I don't want to, you know, critique Sam's ideology without him here to defend himself. | ||
| Although it's fun! | ||
| It is definitely fun, but we'll have to have Sam in here to actually do that, because it would be a lot of fun. | ||
| But one of the things that I've always found weird is that he and I have precisely the same notion of an objective truth, but I don't understand where he's getting his from. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I don't either. | ||
| Because if you base your viewpoint on a materialist evolutionary biology, then what you would say is the truth is that which is most biologically successful. | ||
| Which is the claim I was making when I talked to Right, exactly, which is your claim, and also a claim that leads to religion, because, biologically speaking, religious believers are more biologically successful than non-religious believers over the course of human history. | ||
| Well, also, religious belief evolved. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| Not only did religious belief evolve, clearly it evolved. | ||
| It's one of the human universals. | ||
| The capacity for religious experience evolved. | ||
| Well, you might say, why? | ||
| Well, maybe you could take the viewpoint that seems to be characteristic of Steven Pinker and say, well, it's a spandrel. | ||
| It's just a side effect of something more substantial. | ||
| And my objection to that is, define your spandrels first. | ||
| You don't get to define them post-talk, you know? | ||
| You don't get to define away the side effects of the drug. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's exactly it. | ||
| When people talk about drugs, very often what they'll do is they'll say, well, you know, the drug is for a headache, but it has the side effect of causing you cancer. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like, well, no, the drug causes cancer. | ||
| It's not a side effect. | ||
| Maybe the getting rid of the headache is the side effect. | ||
| I mean, every one of those prescription commercials, you know, headache, diarrhea, nausea, thoughts of suicide, etc, etc. | ||
| But your cough, Michael, you know, it's really nuts. | ||
| All right, here's what we're going to do. | ||
| So I want to be very respectful of both of your times, but yours particularly, because you're doing like a two-hour lecture tonight at the Orpheum. | ||
| There might be a surprise guest there, I don't want to say who. | ||
| So we're going to do a half hour more if you guys can do that. | ||
| We're going to do Q&A from the audience, but I do want to ask you guys one other thing first, and I just want to try to get this to truly be as personal as I can get out of you guys in front of thousands and thousands of people. | ||
| As these last couple years have happened and as you've both risen in profile and you're out there saying what you think all the time and defending your beliefs and being friends with people like Sam who you disagree with on different things and all that, what's sort of been the most personal thing that you've kind of struggled with? | ||
| Along the way. | ||
| I want to go deep before we open it up to the audience. | ||
| Well, for me, it's two things. | ||
| One is, it's not so bad now, it's still pretty bad. | ||
| I've lived in constant existential terror of saying something that will be fatal. | ||
| Because I've been in this situation for 15 months, and there's been a few things that I've done or said that people have argued skirted the edges, and perhaps they did, because if you say 10,000 things, something's going to skirt the edge. | ||
| But I've had to watch myself in an intensely hyper-vigilant manner to ensure that I don't provide those who would like to Provide those who regard me as their enemy with the tools | ||
| to dispense with me Yeah, and you know, I have my family resting on me as well | ||
| as well as whatever else I happen to be doing So that's been extraordinarily intense. And the other thing | ||
| is is persistent feeling of surreal Surreality that see one of the one of the markers of post-traumatic | ||
| stress disorder is that you can't believe that what's happening to you | ||
| It's like I felt that, literally, I felt that way every single day since September of 2016. | ||
| And so I just cannot get accustomed to, well, even just to the scandals that I've been involved in. | ||
| It's just one scandal after another, you know? | ||
| And I don't know, I don't have a frame of reference within which to put this. | ||
| Yeah, I think that, I'll just briefly say for myself, I think, I mean, both of those, right? | ||
| We're all afraid of the one thing, that you can accidentally just misspeak or say something. | ||
| Or they just take you right out of context. | ||
| Take you out of context. | ||
| Wave of media designs, exactly. | ||
| And you say something stupid defending yourself. | ||
| which you could certainly do. | ||
| Or if you've been, I mean, I've been writing columns since I was 17. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they come back. | ||
| No, I know there's one line with you that you once, one tweet that you sent | ||
| that you regret now and it's like. | ||
| Not only do I regret the tweet, in the actual tweet thread, | ||
| I explain exactly what I meant in the tweet, but nobody ever reads the next tweet | ||
| that literally explains what I meant in that tweet. | ||
| Yeah, we don't even have to mention which tweet to just add more fuel to the fire, but very quickly, because I do want to get to the audience questions. | ||
| I think for me, the second one is the one that I struggle with, the surreal one, that sometimes I'll look and see what people are saying about Dave Rubin, and then for a moment I'm like, wait a minute, I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, I don't think any of this, or even if I do think, even if it's something they're nice saying about me, I'm like, wait a minute, that's me, and also just the other part of, you know, we sort of live close to each other, you know, proximity, and I'll go out, and you know, the woman at Petco will say something nice to me, and then for some reason, they always say they like Ben Moore, but like, I go out, and then I'm like, wow, like, the things that I'm doing have meaning to people. | ||
| Like, there's a lot of built-in pressure, or at least for me, there's a lot of like... It's ethical responsibility. | ||
| Yeah, you know and well I feel that too because now when whenever I go somewhere people come up | ||
| And they almost always say the same thing they say you know I was in a pretty dark place, and I've been listening to | ||
| your lectures, and they've really helped Thanks a lot | ||
| And I think man if you could have your wish and you could invent what strangers would say to you on the street | ||
| What a cool thing. | ||
| No kidding, but it's also kind of a terrifying thing because you know people have pinned Well, let's say they've pinned their hopes on what I've what I'm saying That's the right way to say it but in some sense that also means they've pinned their hopes on me and like I'm not by any stretch of the imagination perfect like far from it and so I do live in constant terror of Sinking my ship in a you know in a particularly Awful manner. | ||
| I still think that's the most likely outcome. | ||
| Oh no, you ever get this where you just wake up in terror in the middle of the night, that somebody is going to take something that you said out of context and you think, did I really say it exactly the way I meant to say it? | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| That's, I mean, that, that, yeah, that's, that's a definite thing. | ||
| And then you, and the upside is that people listen to what we're saying and take it seriously. | ||
| And the downside is that people listen to what we're taking and take it seriously. | ||
| So for you, then, would it be something, I mean, without getting too in the weeds, like something related to, like, security or something? | ||
| I mean, when you travel now, you have to have someone with you. | ||
| I mean, that's freaking ridiculous. | ||
| That I file under surreal, because I actually have never thought of myself as in serious physical danger. | ||
| Even when people say, you're in serious physical danger, I think to myself, like, this is America. | ||
| Am I really in physical? | ||
| Like, whenever I do these lectures and I've got a security team of ten people around me, what I tell myself, and maybe it's me whistling past the graveyard, is, I'm the safest guy in the room. | ||
| I'm the one with the security team. | ||
| But it's, yeah, I mean, that's weird. | ||
| The confluence of politics now is so odd. | ||
| I mean, last night during the State of the Union, they introduced Trump as the President of the United States | ||
| and I just find myself laughing out loud because what in the world is going on? | ||
| Like, forget that I like a lot of the stuff he's doing, like what in the world? | ||
| And there's a, I was reading a book about Brahms the other day and this book about Brahms, | ||
| it talks about how he's hobnobbing with various other composers. | ||
| He's friends with Dvorak, and he has fights with Wagner, and he's walking in these circles. | ||
| And I thought, wow, that must have been a cool thing to walk in these circles. | ||
| And then I look around and I realize that the people that I work with in a hundred years, this may be the people that they're writing about. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And that was the day that Shapiro got together with Rubin and Jordan Peterson and talked about deep issues of philosophy. | ||
| And you realize, well, how did we end up in this position? | ||
| This is one of the issues of existential terror I have is, are we the best that we have to offer? | ||
| Like, I look at all the people in the White House, for example, I know, like, half the people in the White House, and I think, is this the pinnacle? | ||
| And that's not a rip on the people in the White House, that's a rip on humanity. | ||
| Like, is this the best that we can do? | ||
| Am I even close to, like, why should I be in this position of prominence? | ||
| Like, there have got to be people smarter than I am. | ||
| I mean, a lot of them. | ||
| There's a beautiful thing out there. | ||
| Yeah, I would hope. | ||
| I mean, I asked somebody this thought experiment the other day, which would you prefer to be? | ||
| The smartest man in a dumb civilization or the dumbest man in a smart civilization? | ||
| And I think I can honestly say I prefer to be the dumbest man in a smart civilization, and there's something disquieting about being seen anyway as one of the smart people in a dumb civilization. | ||
| Well, you know what, there are literally thousands of people watching this live, obviously, and that'll watch this over the next couple months, and hopefully there will be some people that will come up with some better ideas than Ben Shapiro and Jordan Pearson and Gabe Rubin, and we'll go find something else to do. | ||
| All right, here's what we're gonna do. | ||
| We're gonna take a quick little break. | ||
| I know already they're giving me the signal we have like roughly 400 billion questions. | ||
| We will do our best to be brief. | ||
| That's easy for you guys, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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What we're known for, that's another thing I'm known for, is brevity. | |
| All right, so give us just like a minute or two, hang tight right there, and questions in a moment. | ||
|
unidentified
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["The Light of Day"] | |
| All right, guys, we're gonna try to plow through as many questions as possible. | ||
| As I said, Jordan is at the Orpheum Theater here in downtown Los Angeles tonight. | ||
| It's sold out already, right? | ||
| It is sold out. | ||
| There's gonna be riots outside. | ||
| But if you have a ticket, you will see Jordan later. | ||
| Here we go, all right, super chat for Jordan. | ||
| We're gonna try to do these as quickly as possible. | ||
| I've recently taken your Understand Myself personality test and scored very low in all aspects of agreeableness. | ||
| I have the cognitive ability to emulate these aspects and do so for the benefit of my kids and community. | ||
| Is emulation enough, or do I have to actually take the steps in honestly showing agreeableness? | ||
| Can you fake it, basically? | ||
| Well, if emulation is motivated by, let's call it a noble aim, the understanding that reciprocity is necessary, there is evidence showing that disagreeable people do quite a bit better if they go out of their way to do things for other people. | ||
| Do they make that a practice? | ||
| And the thing is, if you're an introvert, you have to become a conscious extrovert. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So if you're disagreeable, you have to become consciously agreeable. | ||
| You can do it. | ||
| And emulation is the first step to incorporating it, I would say. | ||
| So if you're doing it to manipulate people, well, that's a different story. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Man, I mean, there's a ton of people here that donated on Super Chat just to say hi and thank you. | ||
| So hello to everybody. | ||
| Quick one for Ben. | ||
| I think we've already hit this, but any chance of a future discussion with Milo? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay, fair enough. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'd rather talk with people who have something to say. | |
| Okay, here's an interesting one, and Jordan during the break mentioned that we should be doing a show on the future at some point. | ||
| Do you think, like me, that abortion and artificial intelligence will eliminate humanity as we know it? | ||
| I'm watching this new Philip K. Dick thing on Hulu now, so I'm very into it. | ||
| Yeah, I tried it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I can't get into it. | ||
| Come on, you can do it. | ||
| You're a sci-fi guy. | ||
| You can get there. | ||
| Well, we could talk about AI. | ||
| AI is going to transform what human beings are dramatically. | ||
| We're going to have to decide in what manner we want to be transformed. | ||
| And we should bloody well hope and pray that the people who are leading the technological revolution are careful and ethical people. | ||
| But hasn't that ship sailed? | ||
| I mean, I feel like we know already that that's not how it's going to be. | ||
| We know there's so many problems related to the diversity memo and the algorithms and all that already from the tech companies. | ||
| Sure, but there's lots of people working on this. | ||
| Oh, you should be terrified of this transhumanism. | ||
| It's like, what do we want to turn into? | ||
| We need a vision of the future, which is why we need to talk about the future. | ||
| I think one of the things we need to do collectively is to develop. | ||
| It's like, okay, I believe that the human race can do anything it wants in the next 30 years. | ||
| You know, Bill Gates was talking the other day about eradicating malaria. | ||
| He's really set on eradicating the five major transmissible diseases. | ||
| That could happen! | ||
| It's like we could eliminate most of our problems. | ||
| It's like, well, we should concentrate on the future that we would like to have, and try to bring it into being, and then maybe we can get artificial intelligence to serve that, instead of serving whatever inchoate and pathological set of principles that it's serving now, which we will suffer for. | ||
| Yeah, well, let's cross our fingers. | ||
| What is the likelihood that the SJW postmodern left collapse will happen soon, basically? | ||
| I think that it's more likely than people think it is. | ||
| I'll put it that way. | ||
| I think that right now the SJWs think that they're on top and they think that they are ascendant. | ||
| And I think that the growing popularity of people who are not that Especially among young people. | ||
| I mean, my entire audience is young people. | ||
| Legitimately, my entire audience is people who are under the age of 40, and probably half my audience is under the age of 25. | ||
| And I probably imagine it's the same for you, Jordan. | ||
| I think that there's a whole group of young people who are just looking at this stuff and innately saying, I'm bored with it. | ||
| There's nothing here. | ||
| And so I think there's a good shot that the identity politics is actually an older person's game. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, you know, we're only going to do two more. | ||
| We'll categorize all of these, and next time you guys are on, we'll hit some of these. | ||
| But we'll do two more, because I think they're good. | ||
| They sort of hit right where we're going here. | ||
| You both can answer this, but it's directed to you, Jordan. | ||
| Any follow-up on your call earlier this month for students to stand up and leave the classroom whenever the teacher mentions equity, diversity, and justice? | ||
| And I know this is something you've talked about a bit, about how you deal with college professors. | ||
| Yeah, this was for junior high and high school. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| kids to talk to their parents about. Well, I was trying to provide people with easy | ||
| markers to note that their children are being indoctrinated and not educated. I | ||
| said, well, if they're talking about equity, diversity, inclusivity, white | ||
| privilege, or gender, it's time to leave the class. And now, that didn't | ||
| cause nearly as much trouble, that video, as I thought it might. Yeah, I mean, that's | ||
| a pretty dangerous idea to be telling that to a 13, 14 year old. | ||
| Yes, yes, but it's also dangerous not to tell them that. | ||
| And I mean, it's particularly germane in Ontario, where the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario has explicitly developed a social justice curriculum with that name, whose explicit purpose is to transform kids from kindergarten to grade 8 into social justice activists. | ||
| They've even bent the selection of literature to promote that. | ||
| So they're perverting art for ideology. | ||
| And that's the official policy of the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario. | ||
| If they're going to do that, play that game, then for me to say, look, here's five phrases that are pretty decently diagnostic. | ||
| You can be pretty certain that if these topics come up in your class, that you're now into indoctrination territory. | ||
| Yeah, I think people should walk. | ||
| What's the risk, though, of saying that to a kid that may come home and the parents may not even understand these issues enough to defend them? | ||
| Risk everywhere, man. | ||
| It's the risk of going along with it. | ||
| There's the risk of standing up against it. | ||
| And I believe, and that's why I've been doing what I've been doing, is that I believe that the risk of stating that this is dangerous and should stop is way less than the risk of going along with it. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| All right, so this is going to be the last one for now. | ||
| We will pick this up at another point. | ||
| And we also discussed during the break that maybe we can do some kind of live thing together with this whole crew of people that we're talking about. | ||
| We'll see who we can get to do that probably in L.A., but we'll see. | ||
| This one, I'm sure I've asked you some form of this. | ||
| in our other interviews before, but I think it's the one that sort of hands this back | ||
| to the audience for both of you. | ||
| For some time now, I've wanted to start doing something to protect liberty and Western values, | ||
| etc., but I have no idea where to start. | ||
| What's the most useful thing I can do to start as an average person? | ||
| I mean, I think that my answer to this is sort of the same answer as to what you should | ||
| just do in life generally. | ||
| Find something that you're good at, find something you like to do, and find something that's useful. | ||
| And where those three things conflate, where those three things overlap, that's where you're going to be the happiest and that's where you're going to feel you're making a difference. | ||
| Because if you only have two of those three things, then you're butting your head against a brick wall. | ||
| If you like to do something and you think that it's going to influence other people but you suck at it, it's not going to work for you. | ||
| Try to openly identify your own skill set. | ||
| Find what it is that you're good at, and then figure, how do I use this skill set, something I'm good at and enjoy doing, how do I use that for a purpose that is useful? | ||
| And it sounds like you already have your purpose, it's just a question of what can you do that actually helps effectuate that purpose. | ||
| Without knowing your skill set, I don't know, but if I knew your skill set, then I could help define what you could do with that to get from point A to point B. Yeah, so I suspect you probably agree, but what about the courage part? | ||
| Well, I would just add a little bit to that. | ||
| There are some things that you'll see that will bother you. | ||
| Some of those are your problems. | ||
| That's why they bother you. | ||
| Like, there's lots of things in the world that are happening that don't bother you. | ||
| It's like they're not your problems. | ||
| The things that bother you, for some reason, are your problems. | ||
| Find something that bothers you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's where to start. | |
| Start small. | ||
| that you could start fixing and start fixing it. | ||
| That's it, and you should do it competently, do it in a domain where you're competent, | ||
| do it in a domain where you're interested, but there are things that you'll see around you | ||
| that you think could be set right that you could set right. | ||
| It's like, go for it, you'll get good at it, and then you'll set bigger and bigger things right. | ||
| That's where to start. | ||
| Start small, you won't end small. | ||
| I mean, I can tell you in the most intimate way as you guys are now in my house, in my studio that we built | ||
| that's funded by the people that are watching this. | ||
| I just had an idea. | ||
| And I started talking about it. | ||
| I started a YouTube channel that literally everyone watching this can do. | ||
| I mean, look at the three of us. | ||
| We all started putting stuff out there, going, is this going to work? | ||
| None of us were greenlit. | ||
| I've never been greenlit or had any respect from the industry altogether. | ||
| Listen guys, it was a pleasure. | ||
| What do you do before a show? | ||
| You can take a nap maybe? | ||
| I'm definitely going to take a nap. | ||
| Yeah, you don't take naps. | ||
| Does Ben Shapiro take naps? | ||
| I take naps, yeah. | ||
| You take naps? | ||
| Yeah, I have two kids. | ||
| One just turned four. | ||
| Yes, I take naps. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| All right, fair enough. | ||
| It's been a pleasure, guys. | ||
| We'll figure out some ways to expand this to the wider group and do some live events and everything else, and we'll keep this conversation going. | ||
| Thank you guys for all the comments. | ||
| I promise you we're gonna list everything out. | ||
| So whether you submit it on Super Chat or Patreon, we'll try to get back to all this stuff. | ||
| And when I do my live streams, I'll try to address some of this directly. | ||
| So thanks for watching, and thank you for YouTube for actually allowing the stream to be up. | ||
| What are the chances we're monetized by tomorrow? | ||
| I'd hate to bet. |
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