Sept. 25, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
02:05:49
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unidentified
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All right, people, we are live on the YouTube. | |
| This is an impromptu livestream. | ||
| This came together yesterday because there are so many forces in the world that are moving so freaking fast right now. | ||
| And the man sitting across from me has been tracking these things like a, like a what? | ||
| How are you tracking these things? | ||
| Like a mathematician. | ||
| Like a mathematician, Eric Weinstein, everybody knows you already. | ||
| All right, we got a lot to do here. | ||
| Real quick, I'm gonna go back to the camera over there for just a second. | ||
| So I'm gonna do about an hour and a half with Eric. | ||
| We're gonna chat about all kinds of stuff. | ||
| And then, no, I'm gonna keep talking to you. | ||
| So we're gonna do about an hour and a half together. | ||
| And then we're going to do Patreon-only Q&A, so only the RubinSelect people are going to get in on that. | ||
| Patreon.com slash RubinReport, and any people that joined at any level will be able to ask us questions directly. | ||
| No censoring around here. | ||
| Are you alright with that? | ||
| I am. | ||
| Okay, so the reason I wanted to do this, and we've been trading a lot of calls the last couple of days, and the reason I was like, we gotta just do this tomorrow, is that I feel like I'm living in kind of two worlds at the moment. | ||
| That I've been on this tour with Peterson for the last, you know, four months or so, we've done about 50 cities. | ||
| You've appeared at some of the shows where I've brought you on, and you play the harmonica and get the crowd going, and 3,000 people cheering as you're playing the harmonica, which I assume is your greatest professional joy so far. | ||
| But I'm meeting quite literally thousands of people every night in different cities all over this country, and soon to be all over the world. | ||
| We're about to do 18 stops in Europe. | ||
| that are coming together over ideas, that are putting political differences aside, getting rid of the hate, trying to figure out some answers. | ||
| They dig what we're doing, what's going on with the IDW, all of that. | ||
| Then you go on Twitter and everywhere else online, and just the hate fest seems to have been ramped up. | ||
| And it's not just Twitter, I always talk about it in a Twitter perspective, but just everything, the articles of hating this one, hating that one, all this stuff with Kavanaugh, everyone, these siloing of opinions has just, It's increased exponentially and it all seems to be getting worse. | ||
| And that brings me to why you're sitting here. | ||
| Because you came on this show about two years ago for the first time. | ||
| We had just met a little bit before that. | ||
| And we started talking about fake news just as it was bubbling up. | ||
| And I think some of your predictions that you laid out were kind of right. | ||
| And I suspect that maybe you have a couple answers to some of the theories that you dropped back then. | ||
| How was that for an intro? | ||
| Weinstein! | ||
| A lot of that matches my own experience. | ||
| And I do think that these parallel worlds are very confusing if you've never seen what I've termed the vampire effect. | ||
| So a vampire is supposed to not reflect in a looking glass when it passes by. | ||
| And in essence, the shows that you're doing with Jordan are Vampiric, that at some level they don't really exist. | ||
| He can produce people coming together, extraordinary impacts in people's lives, he can talk about his disdain for reactionary movements, and it doesn't change the narrative at all. | ||
| And so at some level, there are two Jordan Petersons, there are two Dave Rubins, there may even be two Eric Weinsteins, but I'm a smaller fish in this pond. | ||
| And one of them is a fictional character that is drawn using details of your actual life, and the other is your actual life. | ||
| So one's just a media caricature, basically. | ||
| But it's a very interesting caricature. | ||
| In other words, it's as if somebody has affixed strings to your hands and to your feet, and so every time you make a motion, your character has to move. | ||
| So you have to start doing these calculations. | ||
| If I say something a little bit nuanced, I have to run the risk that it will be taken out of context and my media character will end up saying something that I find absolutely abhorrent. | ||
| And so the goal is to get you to consider the consequences of your actions. | ||
| If I tell you that every action you could take would be mapped to some consequence that I will Right into a story then you start thinking okay. | ||
| It's not a question of what I want to do It's a question of what do I want to do given the fact that you're going to caricature me? | ||
| So do you think that these even if they're self-imposed? | ||
| Constraints have now been placed on many people about how they speak and it really how they think and how they act You think it's significantly worse now than it was even two years ago well Because right before the election, you had all these people saying, oh, you know, the polls were off because all the Trump people, let's say, didn't want to say what they really thought. | ||
| It seems like those screws have been tightened even more so. | ||
| I don't mean it just in a Trump context. | ||
| Through one lens, things have gotten much worse. | ||
| But I'm actually in a kind of a different mood about all of this. | ||
| I would say that when I first came on, I was quite cautious. | ||
| And I said that this fake news meme, if you will, felt very inauthentic. | ||
| Trump had just won the election in November of 2016. | ||
| And my interpretation at the time, which hasn't changed much, was that the people who had lost control of the major narratives Realized that they needed to buy time to figure out how they were going to re-establish narrative control. | ||
| And so what they did was they created a shell, in my opinion, that they were going to have to fill as they had meetings and figured out what they wanted to do. | ||
| And that shell was fake news. | ||
| So basically by pushing the idea of all the Trump voters were paying attention to fake news, that's what caused them to vote for Trump. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, so you have this problem, which is that when you have to call 50 percent of your electorate deplorable because they're voting for someone beyond the pale. | ||
| Now, keep in mind, I think it's absolutely essential that we unelect Trump as soon as possible. | ||
| So I've called him an existential risk from before the election, and I continue to do everything I can do honorably and decently to figure out how to unelect him. | ||
| You were a Bernie guy. | ||
| Well, I was a Bernie guy in the sense that I voted for Bernie and I definitely saw him as the most survivable of the three major options with Hillary, Bernie, and Donald. | ||
| What I felt then at the time, and I said so, is that we should not have a choice between three boomer Candidates, or older candidates, we need fresh new ideas, and none of these people's experience speaks at all to me. | ||
| So, it's not that I was wildly supportive of Bernie and his economics policies, which made very little sense to me. | ||
| It was that he was struggling to be a decent human being, and he was an absolute maverick like Trump, but he was a maverick who had managed to survive within the system. | ||
| So, there was a level of trust that I had with him, even though I thought he was economically confused. | ||
| What I believe now is that we've been shown what got put into that container called fake news or media manipulation. | ||
| And rather than it being terrifying, I'm sort of on the fence about this, but I think I'm going to go in the direction of funny. | ||
| Like, this report that just came out from Data & Society Club on the Alternative Influence Network. | ||
| Had you ever heard of these people before this report, by the way? | ||
| Well, I'd heard of the woman who founded it, Dana Boyd, and I've actually co-run sessions with an advisor of theirs named Hillary Mason, who is a top-notch data scientist. | ||
| I didn't have the most negative impression of the roster of people. | ||
| There's some people who I view as very ideological over there, but I didn't actually know about data in society. | ||
| It sort of seemed to be an echo of things that you see in the Tim O'Reilly network, or what is it, the Berkman Center at Harvard. | ||
| So it's connected up through all of the major institutions. | ||
| If you look at the funders of Data & Society, it's the Sloan Foundation, it's the New York Times, | ||
| it's, I think it's Open Society. | ||
| So Bill and Melinda Gates. | ||
| So what's going on? | ||
| Let's pause for a second for the people that don't know what this thing is at all. | ||
| I think most people watching probably do. | ||
| But basically they issued this report, the Alternative Influencer Network, and it was sort of how the reactionary right is monetizing and extending their influence throughout YouTube. | ||
| And it was heavily based on me as one of the people. | ||
| I think I was mentioned 77 times. | ||
| In this report. | ||
| Joe Rogan, of course, was included. | ||
| Jordan Peterson was included. | ||
| Tim Poole, who I've had on the show. | ||
| Dennis Prager. | ||
| Prager was interesting that he was included because they included his name, Dennis Prager, even though this was about YouTubers, but really they were going after his channel, PragerU. | ||
| I think that's just an interesting distinction. | ||
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unidentified
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Sure. | |
| That they went after the man, not the channel. | ||
| Then there was a series of other people on there that I have no idea who they are. | ||
| There were real white nationalists, I suppose, on there, from what I understand now. | ||
| But basically, they issued this insane graph linking us all together that looked like six degrees of Kevin Bacon on steroids, and there were errors. | ||
| I mean, I know there's errors even related to me. | ||
| They didn't have me and Rogan connected. | ||
| I've been on your show three times. | ||
|
unidentified
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You're going to ruin the whole thing if you explain everything that's wrong. | |
| Okay, please. | ||
| I have a lot to say about this. | ||
| I know. | ||
| But the thing is that at first, I thought it was like the 80s and I'd forgotten that we had these channels. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Three's Company was on there. | ||
| You couldn't believe it. | ||
| Well, the funny thing is, is that before there was no way to fight these things. | ||
| Like if you couldn't jack into the network of newspapers and radio stations, there was no way to fight back. | ||
| So all of these things were terrifying. | ||
| But I noticed that I wasn't a part of this graph. | ||
| And at first I had this like sense of relief. | ||
| And then I thought, I should just go on Dave Rubin's show and become part of the Alternative Reactionary Influence Network as a Bernie voter. | ||
| Gay pro-choice pot smoking against the death penalty over here. | ||
| Big right winger. | ||
| By the way, just as a fellow neo-Nazi, can I ask how you spent Yom Kippur? | ||
| Oh, it was lovely. | ||
| I broke it with bagels. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I mean, they've got Ben Shapiro on there saying he's a white nationalist. | ||
| It's so completely insane that it really doesn't require refutation. | ||
| What it requires is a middle schooler with an IQ of above 80. | ||
| and an assignment to say what's wrong with the methodology of this report | ||
| because so far as I could tell there is no methodology in the report. | ||
| It's not just that it's got errors and what's... | ||
| Can you explain what in a report like this what a proper methodology would be? | ||
| Because from what I could understand in the 61 pages of this thing, | ||
| they basically just tried to link us together. | ||
| This person talked to this person. | ||
| This person once interviewed this person. | ||
| This person appeared somewhere with this person. | ||
| Forgetting the errors in those connections. | ||
| But that, to me, doesn't strike me as a methodology. | ||
| It strikes me as just human connections. | ||
| People cross with people. | ||
| It doesn't mean you're promoting them. | ||
| It doesn't mean you're secretly working with them or that you're in a network. | ||
| I mean, that's what they were really going for here, and I think there's a bigger reason for that that we're going to get to in a little bit. | ||
| Well, okay. | ||
| What could they have done? | ||
| Yeah, if you were doing it properly, and you were trying to show here's a small group of people that have created this network to extend these horrible ideas... We are alternative, we do have influence, and there is a part of us that is a network. | ||
| So, in fact, that's not really where the problem is. | ||
| What you would do normally is you would set out Some list of qualities, characteristics, that didn't pick names that you selectively wanted to feature. | ||
| And you would say, OK, here's what we did. | ||
| We came up with the following rule. | ||
| Somebody needs to appear on at least three shows. | ||
| We've done this so that it's exhaustive. | ||
| And everybody who fits these criteria is listed on this graph. | ||
| And look what emerges. | ||
| Or they at least hold certain beliefs, right? | ||
| Could you do it that way? | ||
| I'm just trying to say, you're asking me what I would think would be a proper methodology. | ||
| So you'd state something that was fairly neutral that didn't name anyone. | ||
| And then it would emerge that the network was the solution to the carefully stated problem. | ||
| And then you'd say, isn't this interesting that when I look at those Criteria, it picks out Dave Rubin and Richard Spencer, and it doesn't pick out Ezra Klein and Sarah John. | ||
| Unfortunately, you know, Ezra Klein does a podcast with Sam Harris. | ||
| Sam Harris is named in the appendix, but he's not on the graph, I think. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The, you know, Noam Chomsky has appeared on Stefan Molyneux. | ||
| So if you actually put all of the people Who would occur as part of a proper methodological discovery of a network, there would be things that didn't go your way. | ||
| And then there'd be a section at the end that says, we note that the following anomalies are present, people who are clearly opposed You might have Linda Sarsour with a node on the network. | ||
| And you'd say, OK, why is Linda Sarsour two degrees separated from Richard Spencer? | ||
| And then you'd have to say, these are maybe some deficiencies. | ||
| Here's some ideas for further research. | ||
| But the point is that there was nothing like a methodology. | ||
| And when you look at the author's ideological commitments, which he's very comfortable | ||
| sharing, they fly in the face of fact. | ||
| So there's no. | ||
| She's not trying to present herself, so far as I can tell, as a dispassionate researcher. | ||
| She's trying to present herself as an activist. | ||
| She has tweets from August, since deleted, because she uses that tweet scrubber thing or whatever it is, talking about how deplatforming people is the answer to these problems that she proposes we have. | ||
| Pretty clear what's going on here. | ||
| You see, even on there, Dave, I could understand somebody saying, look, let's talk about what deplatforming is and let's talk about it in neutral terms so that it's not being used selectively to wipe out reasonable ideas that I disagree with. | ||
| There's no pretense. | ||
| There's no semblance. | ||
| And that's why I think this is... I have a different feeling about this than I had expected, which is like, bring this on! | ||
| Give me more! | ||
| Because if you show me who's willing to salute this report, you know, is this going to be featured by the Berkman Center at Harvard? | ||
| I went to Harvard. | ||
| You couldn't turn something like this into a statistics department or a math department and be considered a researcher. | ||
| You'd be considered a lunatic. | ||
| And so if Harvard then salutes this thing, that's going to tell us about an ideological commitment. | ||
| Does the New York Times support this? | ||
| They're certainly funding this. | ||
| They're funding the Center for Data and Society. | ||
| So we know that The Guardian liked it. | ||
| We know that Vox liked it. | ||
| BuzzFeed. | ||
| BuzzFeed, Wired. | ||
| I didn't see BuzzFeed, actually. | ||
| Yeah, BuzzFeed did. | ||
| I saw New York Times reporters tweeting it, NBC News reporters tweeting it. | ||
| But did it occur in The New York Times? | ||
| Because I'm seeing... No, so I haven't seen that. | ||
| I'm seeing that even the publications who probably would like to find that this report is reasonable know They gotta be very careful, because if you embrace this report, it's so bad that you're telling people what your standards are for intellectual discourse. | ||
| And that's what makes it fascinating. | ||
| So you want more of this because you believe this will hasten the destruction of the monster we've been fighting, basically. | ||
| I want to know how I can help them to produce more reports like this. | ||
| You have to understand what the purpose of a report like this is. | ||
| And I think somewhere, this is my fifth appearance on your show, so I'm probably getting close to winning something. | ||
| Doesn't get more reactionary than this. | ||
| You know what, I'll pour you some whiskey for the Q&A. | ||
| How about that? | ||
|
unidentified
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There you go. | |
| I accept. | ||
| I brought up this gated institutional narrative, and this is where this report is supposed to slot in. | ||
| In other words, it's not meant for individual consumption. | ||
| It's meant to be a citable report. | ||
| And so it's got, like, high production graphics. | ||
| And hey, it's a PDF. | ||
| PDFs are hard to make. | ||
| It's not a Word document. | ||
| We can let you fix a PDF. | ||
| It's locked in. | ||
| So the idea is you're supposed to be able to hold a conference, let's say, under the | ||
| auspices of the National Academy of Sciences or Brookings or Berkman Center, whatever it | ||
| is, and you're supposed to say, well, earlier in the year we had this fabulous report by | ||
| Rebecca Lewis at the Center for Data and Society, and they're doing some remarkable work about | ||
| how people are being radicalized, and I think this is very important and pressing. | ||
| And so you have a big, serious conversation in a closed conference, and you release proceedings, | ||
| and then maybe you'll allow the public in for the final day, and you say, well, thank | ||
| you all for joining the conversation. | ||
| Of course, none of those people in the audience is allowed to join the conversation. | ||
| And that's what the gated institutional narrative is all about, that if you don't own a seat Somewhere on the institutional network, you can't get into that conversation. | ||
| So there's nobody who's going to be in a position to say, you realize that report would not be acceptable at any reasonable middle school as a data project. | ||
| So that's what someone was hoping for this. | ||
| But I think even for these institutions, they're going to be a little bit wary Because it's so nakedly ideological and so piss poor on the analytics. | ||
| Okay, so when I saw this thing come out and I called you and I was pissed and I was like, oh, here we go again, just another one of these things. | ||
| And I was saying, you know, this is just their way of inching us closer to deplatforming. | ||
| It may be. | ||
| But you think that's a secondary issue here? | ||
| What I'm trying to say is, And by the way, thank you for having my friend Peter Thiel on. | ||
| Oh yeah, no problem. | ||
| That was great. | ||
| Yeah, we can talk about that too. | ||
| You know, Peter has this brilliant way of analyzing things. | ||
| You have something that a powerful entity could do. | ||
| And then he says, but the level of violence needed to accomplish that goal is probably not something that that entity could stomach. | ||
| Well, I have no doubt that people are fantasizing about doing to all of these people what was done to Alex Jones. | ||
| With Alex Jones, there's so much over-the-top stuff that a lot of people... | ||
| Breathe the sigh of relief. | ||
| Thank God somebody rid us of that terrible Alex Jones. | ||
| Now, I'm not going to get into whether Alex Jones is good or bad. | ||
| No, no, but putting... Let me continue slightly. | ||
| They could try to take the alternative influence network that they have identified off the air. | ||
| Okay, what would that look like? | ||
| You've got to somehow get rid of Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Sam Harris. | ||
| Et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| And we've got new kids coming up all the time who are set to be major voices. | ||
| So are you going to get rid of all of these people? | ||
| Because if you do that, the only way to do that is in such a visible way. | ||
| The way they can do this now is harassment through algorithms, where suddenly you don't get the number of views that fit the pattern. | ||
| You're demonetized. | ||
| You can't make money. | ||
| So do you think that we, this IDW crew, whoever this is at this point, do you think we kind of dropped the ball on not offering Jones a better defense? | ||
| Not having anything to do with the content. | ||
| They're harassing us. | ||
| It's digital harassment. | ||
| So do you think that we, this IDW crew, whoever this is at this point, | ||
| do you think we kind of dropped the ball on not offering Jones a better defense, | ||
| not having anything to do with the content? | ||
| I've watched maybe 10 minutes of him ever. | ||
| So put the content aside, but that there was this digital assassination, | ||
| basically, where it's like, all right, well, if this guy can't be on Twitter | ||
| and can't be on PayPal and can't be on YouTube, can he have a phone? | ||
| Is he allowed to have a phone? | ||
| Can he have running water at his house? | ||
| I mean, what is the line? | ||
| Should Republicans be allowed to use streets? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| That is a good question. | ||
| Where are we going with this? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So should we have offered, not because we were defending him or any of his ideas, but should we have offered, man, these platforms doing this basically in conjunction with each other, because it all happened, you know, within a 24-hour period? | ||
| Yeah, I thought about this. | ||
| I mean, I tweeted about it, and I said something about this is ominous, having nothing to do with Jones, that all of these platforms deplatformed him suddenly. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But my belief about this is that because the platforms occupy a very strange position, I don't think we have good jurisprudence around these platforms. | ||
| No, we clearly don't. | ||
| And it bothers me that we don't realize that the shift has been so dramatic. | ||
| Are these companies? | ||
| Are they utilities? | ||
| Are they natural monopolies because of the QWERTY problem of path dependence? | ||
| I'm not positive that we have the economic theory, the legal jurisprudence to just refer to precedence and say, well, this is a clear violation of the Sherman and Clayton Acts, or that this is covered under New York Times v. Sullivan, or who knows what. | ||
| I think we're going to need a lot of new thinking. | ||
| And so the problem that I'm having is I don't know exactly where to fight this, and fighting it around Alex Jones, particularly with the Sandy Hook issue, strikes me as, I want to be maximally effective. | ||
| So I was very clear about taking issue with the sudden de-platforming, but to the point where you're saying that businesses should be allowed to do what they want to do, well, Is this simply a business? | ||
| And keep in mind that we have very good information about how our government used to harass people who held dissident political perspectives in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. | ||
| But we've got no information about whether or not this is being coordinated through the intelligence communities. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| I've talked before about TIM, and sometimes people call it TIME, for Technology Intelligence Media, and if you add education, that is the universities and the research infrastructure. | ||
| That conglomerate, that association of major institutions, we don't know what we're up against. | ||
| So how do we start thinking about this issue? | ||
| I actually think that this issue that you've just laid out here, not just because it affects us in a very obvious way while we're doing this, I actually believe this is probably a far bigger issue than anything going on with Kavanaugh right now, or certainly the other ridiculous political machinations, or half the stuff going on with midterms. | ||
| This way that we conduct And transfer information, and who you can get it. | ||
| And yeah, well, sense-making comes on the back of our ability to communicate with each other. | ||
| And I think this is probably the biggest issue out there, and by the way, I'm glad you just called me out on it, but this is where I'm running my classical liberal part that veers into libertarianism, is starting where the rubber's meeting the road, and I'm going, maybe there isn't. | ||
| I don't want the government to come in. | ||
| You know that's against everything I stand for. | ||
| No, it's not against everything you stand for. | ||
| Look, one of my goals is to get you off Come on! | ||
| I think competition is still the answer, but I do think... No, no, we agree that where competition works, it is the answer. | ||
| But if you are truly a free marketeer, You should know about market failure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you should not pretend that markets can solve all problems because you will have a world that is absolutely red of tooth and claw. | ||
| Well, I think we're sort of heading there with this. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| I can't create a YouTube. | ||
| But I'm trying to say that, you know, all I'm asking is that you reconsider your position because of the complexities about, you know, a path-dependent monopoly, which we refer to sometimes as QWERTY, after the typewriter, may have a funny structure and it's not clear that We should break it up or not break it up or regulate it or not regulate it. | ||
| These are open questions and I'm absolutely, I agree with you as somebody who's much more in a classic progressive position, although that has nothing to do with what people claim is progressivism now, that where the market works, you let the market work, right? | ||
| But it's not clear that the market is meant to work here because there's too many asymmetries of information. | ||
| I mean, Google holds so many of our secrets. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so what happens when they've got a problem and they can also read all your email? | ||
| And then you're thinking, like, OK, well, that's a level of power that's not like a company. | ||
| You know, maybe somebody can invent some sort of email where the company can't read your email, but then the question is, are they responsible for regulating? | ||
| Right, who runs that? | ||
| Well, okay, but that's exactly what the data and society people are supposed to be doing, or the Berkman Center. | ||
| The problem is, is that we have a situation in which it's as if the grown-ups Whoever they are, held a conference, which we were not invited to, and they made a whole bunch of findings, you know, that these people are extreme, these people are good. | ||
| If you think about it in terms of, like, the Hulk, the Hulk, you know, often talks in sentences that don't have one part of speech, you know, so, like, Harvard good. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know, Senate strong. | |
| Well, somehow they have an idea that Harvard has our best interests in mind, that more or less the Democratic Party is that which has to defeat Trump and the progressive agenda, and I put huge scare quotes around progressive here because it's anything but, that those forces, the grown-ups as they see themselves, need to take this thing back. | ||
| And my point to them is, Are you aware of who you have in this alternative influence network? | ||
| Because I think you're sadly mistaken if you don't imagine that the firepower outside of the institutional network, | ||
| intellectual firepower, is as great or greater than the intellectual firepower inside of the institutions, | ||
| which are constantly requiring people to say absolutely outrageous, ridiculous, false things. | ||
| And so good people tend to eventually get so fed up that they can't stay inside of the institutions. | ||
| And the magic of this alternative network, and I mean that in the good sense, | ||
| is that it's based around individuals. | ||
| The main war is not left versus right at the moment. | ||
| It's institutions versus things that are much closer to being individuals. | ||
| So the Rubin Report isn't just you, but it's a team that is relatively small. | ||
| And these relatively small teams don't take on these terrible characteristics of the large institutions. | ||
| So the reason that we're able to be so effective, in my opinion, is that all of the institutions are fighting certain problems having to do with we don't have a really dependable source of growth, we don't have a great national story, they're all sputtering, they're all struggling. | ||
| And the individuals are where the vitality and the energy is. | ||
| So if Jordan Peterson was giving us a biblical lecture on this right now, I think he'd be talking about David versus Goliath, and in this case it might be Dave versus Google. | ||
| But, right? | ||
| I mean, that's the idea, that the small operation, the individual, Or it can be just a small set of individuals. | ||
| We have a lot of leverage because we don't have this cumbersome machine around us. | ||
| I have to answer to myself and a couple other people that I hold in close confidence, but that's it. | ||
| And that's nimble. | ||
| And that's great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's powerful. | ||
| That's powerful. | ||
| Even though it feels kind of scary sometimes. | ||
| Well, but what are you riding on? | ||
| You're writing. | ||
| Great people, I think. | ||
| No. | ||
| You're writing on internals, pipes, storage. | ||
| Oh, you meant literally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right, we are still using their stuff. | ||
| We're still using their stuff. | ||
| And if you take this idea, you see, the deplatforming movement is quite clever. | ||
| Because free speech is enshrined in the Constitution. | ||
| So they can't really go around You know, it's like somebody saying, you're entitled to play your guitar, your electric guitar, but we have the right to cut off your power. | ||
| Well, you can barely hear an electric guitar without an amp, right? | ||
| And so the platforming is a failover into the next level of where can we take this fight? | ||
| And I think it's very important that people read a transcript of a speech by the founder of Data & Society Center, Dana Boyd, where she talks about two important concepts, one of which is data voids. | ||
| And a data void is some place where people want to search for something, but there's not a lot of information around it. | ||
| That's fascinating because that's a lot of how the mainstream institutions control us. | ||
| So I have a very clean example of this. | ||
| The idea that you can be a immigration restrictionist and a clear xenophile, like everything throughout your life speaks to your interest in foreign cultures, your openness to other people, but you happen to be a restrictionist. | ||
| There is a complete void. | ||
| If you go search xenophile restrictionist, you'll probably find me at the top because what may be a majority position in the United States is acknowledged nowhere. | ||
| Meaning that you might be into other cultures, you might even be married to an Indian woman, you might love all sorts of things, speak a gajillion languages every time I get in a car with you, you're speaking another language, you might care about all these other cultures for a million other reasons, but it doesn't mean you want open borders. | ||
| Which is what most people think, I think. | ||
| Well, it's very confusing. | ||
| An analogy would be, do you wish to adopt every person you have over for dinner? | ||
| The idea of being open to dinner guests and expecting that as much as you love them, they will probably leave, if not after dinner, then after a few days or a few weeks. | ||
| You kicked me out, but I was drunk. | ||
| I mean, I was de-runk. | ||
| All right, focus. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sorry. | |
| So we have a situation in which these data voids are real, and they're created by the unwillingness to report. | ||
| Now, this is what's radicalizing people. | ||
| So that was one of the four types of fake news you originally discussed, right? | ||
| Avoidance of an important topic is actually a type of fake news. | ||
| Well, let's see if I can remember them. | ||
| Yeah, let's see if you can do it. | ||
| All right, so there was algorithmic, There was institutional. | ||
| Give me an example of each one. | ||
| Algorithmic fake news has to do with there's something important but you can't find it via search and it's downranked so that it's effectively suppressed and something else is accentuated. | ||
| There was institutional where any institution that wants can broadcast information and people treat it as if it's news, but individuals cannot do this. | ||
| Then there was narrative fake news, where the New York Times is the principal offender here, which they figure out the narrative arc ahead of time. | ||
| And we don't know why they would do that, because the facts haven't come in, but they have an idea of how the facts should be organized as they come in. | ||
| And then there's just false news. | ||
| So the first one is what you're saying, where the algorithmic is the closest. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| But sometimes that occurs just naturally. | ||
| Like, what if nobody thought, why don't we have articles on xenophile restrictionists? | ||
| Oh, we forgot about what may be a majority position in the United States. | ||
| But it's like, it's so large. | ||
| That it's pretending that you can't find an aircraft carrier in a community harbor. | ||
| So that's what makes people crazy. | ||
| The big data voids, if you will, are people who believe that, let's say, that trade is generally good, but that it isn't a rising tide that raises all ships and that you have to do work around it to | ||
| make sure you don't decimate communities and states. | ||
| There was very little real work done on what the effects of trade would be. | ||
| Immigration we just mentioned and then there's the I believe that there's a linkage between terror | ||
| and Islam, but I would think Islamophilic because I'm fascinated by the culture religion and | ||
| find it very easy to to you know socialize in that portion of the world because it's very | ||
| similar to many of the values that I hold. | ||
| We just had a great night with your, what, best friend from college who happens to be Muslim? | ||
| Who even notices? | ||
| Yeah, it doesn't matter. | ||
| So, by creating these voids, saying, don't mention the following obvious fact, because if you do, we have an interpretation. | ||
| If you disagree with us on policy, we can infer that you're a bad person. | ||
| A moral failing will have to be affixed to your name in perpetuity. | ||
| That thing is making people absolutely hate these institutions. | ||
| And my goal in trying to unelect Donald Trump is to say there is no reason that Donald Trump should be running the table by monopolizing these data voids. | ||
| Yes, you can believe that there's a link between terror and Islam and not be Islamophobic. | ||
| Yes, you can believe that we have a problem with the way in which we negotiate trade agreements and you can still want to be open to the world and not a protectionist at heart. | ||
| Yes, you can be a restrictionist and a xenophile simultaneously. | ||
| Those are my big three examples of what makes people hate the institutions. | ||
| And in some sense, I've been thinking that Donald Trump is like a company fragging its senior officers. | ||
| Like, we don't want to be led by people who tell us that we're deplorable because If you pee on our leg and tell us it's raining, we say no. | ||
| You're peeing on my leg, please stop. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And those people who want... | ||
| To say, look, we are the natural guardians of America. | ||
| We know who needs to be de-platformed. | ||
| We know who shouldn't have access to PayPal. | ||
| We should be able to write our terms of service in such a way that pure virtue is boosted and not niceness is pushed down. | ||
| And by the way, pure virtue is everybody I like and nobody I don't. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| OK. | ||
| Well, none of us want to be governed by this. | ||
| Nobody who loves liberty and loves this particular country and loves the Enlightenment wants to be governed by this. | ||
| And so this is an unwanted institutional class, and we're trying to throw them off. | ||
| What happened was, it was so uniform throughout the institutions that they couldn't field candidates. | ||
| that spoke to this fed-upness. | ||
| I mean, we're just fed up? | ||
| Who are these baby boomers who are entitled to tell us how to think? | ||
| And I'm saying this as somebody who comes from the left. | ||
| It shouldn't be a left-right distinction. | ||
| More or less, people who have interesting perspectives as individuals are looking at this and saying, we know you're trying to get us off the platforms. | ||
| We know your engineers hate us. | ||
| Are you reading our DMs? | ||
| Are you going through our emails? | ||
| What are you doing over there? | ||
| And that's where this, the Alex Jones incident, the changes in the terms of service, so now you can be thrown off of a platform, even if you conduct yourself properly on platform because of your off-platform behavior. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of people probably don't know about that. | ||
| You are not making that up. | ||
| No, but this is what happened. | ||
| When I came on your show and I said, I said, the fake news story is inauthentic. | ||
| What I was doing was I was putting a marker and I was saying, watch this space. | ||
| Because what they're going to do is they're going to fill it with some kind of machinery. | ||
| And so there's been a lot of changes. | ||
| One, there are all of these reporting mechanisms. | ||
| You've got loud groups who object to things. | ||
| You put them on a Truth and Safety Council. | ||
| And then the idea is that all of the squeaky wheels who are upset with things, if you give them free pizza and you give them a place at the table, they may shut up, but they're also doing this free work that probably often doesn't need to be done. | ||
| I'm not saying that there isn't abuse on these systems, but you want the abuse to be even-handed. | ||
| If you have a hashtag like Ezra Klein brought up, kill all men. | ||
| Why is Kill All Men? | ||
| Did you read this article? | ||
| I'm not a huge fan of his, frankly. | ||
| Especially in the last couple of days. | ||
| I find him quite personable. | ||
| He's been very nice. | ||
| I'm putting him on a list. | ||
| He's had dinner at your house. | ||
| I've had dinner at your house. | ||
| But he's also been savage. | ||
| He's on a list. | ||
| But he's also been savage. | ||
| So I'm trying to understand the perspective. | ||
| So I'm trying to figure out, is the nice, intelligent guy who came over for Shabbat dinner the same guy as the guy who's rationalizing kill all men? | ||
| I didn't actually mind his rationalization of kill all men. | ||
| What he said is, is that within a small group of feminist Twitter, which I don't think really exists, people talk like that, but since it's an open platform, it doesn't have any walls around it. | ||
| He said that inside that community, that phrase meant, it would be nice if the world were slightly better for women. | ||
|
unidentified
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So, take that, take him at his word. | |
| You would imagine that that same community, if it was epistemically consistent, would also believe, hey, we can't police microaggressions because we have to figure out whether those things are actually not as toxic as they sound. | ||
| But this is what's fascinating, is we think that the same community that should object to anything, like referring to mankind as bigotry, that community should also be allowed to use the hashtag kill all men. | ||
| Now that doesn't make any sense. | ||
| I'm very focused on, are you granting yourself a privilege that you will grant to no one else? | ||
| Because if you recall, what granted the Reformation, it was the selling of indulgences. | ||
| And I believe that what the left thinks it has is an indulgence system. | ||
| That is, Sarah Jong, when promoted to the editorial board of the New York Times, should be granted an indulgence, because she's actually a great person, and she engaged in some bad tweetery, and we should be, there should be compassion, there should be forgiveness, there should not be a black mark on the record. | ||
| So basically, she believes in all the right things, according to the New York Times. | ||
| She's a good person. | ||
| She can say whatever she wants about white people. | ||
| She's a great journalist. | ||
| But she believes in, you know, she's a progressive, and blah blah blah. | ||
| But this other guy, who once said something which was ambiguous | ||
| should be de-platformed for life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I don't think without profanity, I don't think I have any way of communicating | ||
| how hateful that is. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| Literally, how dare you suggest that some community is entitled to own both of these things? | ||
| Ultimate forgiveness for their members and the right to police everyone else. | ||
| And that's what we have to fight. | ||
| So what do you make of what I would argue is the lack of clear thinking on behalf of these people? | ||
| I don't want to make it about Ezra, it doesn't matter. | ||
| But like, look, a report like this comes out, and if we were to parse it, I honestly, I didn't know at least 10 of the people, I'd never even heard of them. | ||
| A whole bunch of them I've had muted on Twitter because they don't like me. | ||
| So it's like, the idea that we were all connected is just silly. | ||
| But if they had done a report just on true white nationalists, you know, They actually probably could have got some of us on our side. | ||
| Maybe not to have them de-platformed, because that's not where I would want to go with it. | ||
| But there's this group of people doing some really bad stuff. | ||
| Here's what it is. | ||
| But they do a sloppy version. | ||
| There's a shortage of out-and-out racists. | ||
| There's an oppression. | ||
| They need a certain amount. | ||
| Look, there is still structural oppression in the world. | ||
| I don't want to have to argue that. | ||
| I can make a convincing case. | ||
| So I do believe that there is structural oppression in our society. | ||
| What do you mean by structural? | ||
| Because this will be a big hang-up point for a lot of people. | ||
| Well, you don't have anything that is explicitly against one race, but when you have a decision about where a road has to be placed and the level of disruption, or how schools are paid from property taxes that are local, You have self-perpetuating systems where the rich become more advantaged and the poor become more disadvantaged over time. | ||
| That wasn't necessarily racial though. | ||
| That was rich versus poor. | ||
| Well, but the point is that what if that correlates and you know, there might be rich versus poor, there might be male versus female. | ||
| I don't think it's the case that we've gotten rid of all oppression. | ||
| And I just think that that would be silly to suggest and it's not, it's important that we not lose sight that because our progressives at the moment are terrible, That we couldn't steel man that point if that was in our interest, and my intention is to do so. | ||
| That said, there isn't enough oppression to explain all of the phenomena that we're seeing. | ||
| So I go to the very simple example of top hundred chess players, one of them is female. | ||
| Now, that cannot be, in my estimation, I don't know. | ||
| Is oppression encoded into the rules of chess? | ||
| Is it because chess is sort of cryptically male? | ||
| And that if we did it with Barbie dolls or some other body positive female thing, that girls would suddenly | ||
| become 50-50? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think it's unlikely to imagine that. | ||
| I don't think that it would have to be 1 versus 99 and maybe it's 20 versus 80 or 40 versus 60. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| But it's unlikely that it's 100% structural oppression. | ||
| Like one of my jokes is end oppression and online anonymous chess. | ||
| It's all that. | ||
| So you have a situation where my team guessed wrong. | ||
| We thought if we could get rid of redlining, if we could get rid of literacy tests, if we could get rid of all of the things that were holding people back that were just nakedly ridiculous. | ||
| That we would have this much more even society. | ||
| And while there's still more work to be done, I would say that preliminary indications are that that solves some of the problem. | ||
| But it didn't solve as much of the problem as we were hoping. | ||
| So now you have two very difficult choices. | ||
| Do you decide that really the problem is that the oppression is super cryptic and it's much worse than anyone imagines? | ||
| That's why you're policing microaggressions? | ||
| Or do you decide, huh, I wonder if there are other factors, and that's kind of disturbing and I'm scared to even consider that question. | ||
| And that's the choice that the progressives and the lefties have faced. | ||
| Can I take it to a slightly less heady place, perhaps? | ||
| Which is, I get you on that on the intellectual level. | ||
| But I think there's just a lazy... it's just lazy thinking. | ||
| For young people, it's just lazy to think the system's rigged against you. | ||
| It's just lazy to think they're coming after you because of your gender, or your sexuality, or your color, or... Well, most of them are coming after you because of your age. | ||
| But it's empowering. | ||
| In other words, it's empowering to these people to think, the whole system's against me. | ||
| I'm going to destroy it. | ||
| So it's like just an easy answer, as opposed to clean up your room and get your shit together. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, when we had that, by the way, it was tremendous fun having Jordan and Ben on the show. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| We did that. | ||
| But I pushed back on that, which is, no, there really is an issue, particularly intergenerationally. | ||
| A lot of these people, If I take the standard child-rearing house where somebody at age 26 wants to propose to somebody at age 24 and say, hey, I've got enough means to have a house and we can have a few kids and you can take off work for a few years to raise them when kids are the most demanding, that's very hard to do at the moment. | ||
| The labor market needs to get much tighter. | ||
| We need to have employers writhing in pain before that becomes possible again. | ||
| And I support making the labor market tighter in order to redistribute some of the wealth using market mechanisms to people who need to start their lives and to become homeowners and to have a stake in the system. | ||
| And we made a huge Mistake, in my opinion, not understanding that when it's so difficult to start a life in your 20s that feels adult, that those people are now pissed as hell. | ||
| And rightfully so, because we're not really hearing them. | ||
| So I think that the one that is most important to me is that we missed the boat on intergenerational oppression. | ||
| I think that one really feels salient. | ||
| There are other things having to do with race and gender, which we have to get to, and I'm not going to pretend that I don't think that there are problems in those areas. | ||
| There very clearly are. | ||
| But there isn't enough problem at the moment. | ||
| I mean, we have so many opportunities with a world crying out for diversity that, you know, we have to be looking how much of this is solvable by going after oppression and how much are we having to invent oppressions in order to avoid looking at more disturbing questions. | ||
| And I think that what's going on is that our betters in the institutional world have already decided that anyone searching for explanations that are not oppression-based And things that can't be cured with diversity is a bad person. | ||
| And that's what's so disturbing. | ||
| Let me ask you something, just on a kind of personal note that we've talked a little bit about privately, that as a guy that came from the institutions, that has plenty of friends and colleagues in the institutions, I mean, you talk about all this stuff. | ||
| And in a certain way, there's a level of kind of kissing that goodbye, right? | ||
| I mean, at some level, by being here and calling these things out constantly, And I liken that to, I forward you emails probably every day now, from people from a zillion walks of life. | ||
| I mean, you know, high school teachers, to choreographers, to lighting people, to... All scared. | ||
| Scared of the exact same thing that you're describing. | ||
| They are seeing this faux diversity come down on them, and certain people now, by their gender, usually male, by their skin color, usually white, And all of these other things are realizing their careers are coming to an end, that they are afraid that their future no longer works, the things that they believed in no longer worked. | ||
| So first, I just want to know, just you personally, that is a real shift for you. | ||
| It has to be, right? | ||
| I don't even know if you want to do this publicly, but I'm just pushing it on you. | ||
| No, let me see if I even understand it. | ||
| Let's talk about what it is that we learn when we do shows and we meet people afterwards. | ||
| Here's what we know that nobody else, in my opinion, knows. | ||
| We know that people are terrified. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The people who are coming to these shows are saying, thank you for speaking out. | ||
| I'm almost ready to say something at work, but I fear that I'll lose my job and my livelihood, and I've got two kids at home. | ||
| And by the way, it's often things like, I believe in low taxes. | ||
| It's not, you know what I mean? | ||
| Oh my God, it's like... Yeah, it's nothing. | ||
| I mean, I believe in free speech. | ||
| I think maybe James Damore was railroaded. | ||
| Oh my God, but he's James Damore. | ||
| He's that tech bro. | ||
| That bro on the end of anything. | ||
| But also the idea that he... The bro report, right? | ||
| It's like, okay, now we don't have to take it seriously. | ||
| But also him as tech bro implying that he's like this frat boy, like cocky asshole. | ||
| This is the most demure... Demure? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, this is the most... No, he's like... He's a guy who's... I think he's openly on the spectrum. | |
| He's the shyest, I mean really, in all the shows I've done, I don't know how many hundreds of interviews I've done, he's the only guest that I felt I needed to spend probably a half hour in the green room just chatting with him to get comfortable enough to talk. | ||
| This was not a bro who wants to get in there and bro it up. | ||
| But this is the fun part. | ||
| I think Bernie bros was basically an invention. | ||
| That institutional voice is dying. | ||
| Because it's so funny. | ||
| Because it's so ludicrous at this point. | ||
| The thing is, you and I happen to have really good information about how many people are scared. | ||
| And we also know that the reason that they're scared is that a tiny number of people who hold these very extreme positions have found their way into the high-leverage seats. | ||
| If you're sitting on the editorial board of the New York Times, that's a high-leverage seat. | ||
| Or if you're a columnist, that's a high-leverage seat. | ||
| Or if you're in the admissions office, or if you're in human resources. | ||
| Or if you are, you know, a judge or a lawmaker. | ||
| And so people are Seeking out these high leverage positions if they hold very radical perspectives, which has to do with alternative logic. | ||
| I mean, I think I want to say very clearly that the real reason that I'm so dead set against this is that people can't be trusted with this level of epistemic inconsistency. | ||
| And I've referred to this as the alternative logic network. | ||
| And I just want to say one or two things from a mathematician's perspective. | ||
| You asked me how I see this from a math perspective. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Give me a little math, for God's sake. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| There's a principle called the principle of explosion. | ||
| And it says, roughly, that from a contradiction, you can deduce anything. | ||
| Smuggle one contradiction through airport security, and on the other side, you can come up with anything. | ||
| Two equals seven, two equals a chicken. | ||
| The United States doesn't exist. | ||
| And so this is where scientists get very persnickety about somebody saying, oh, come on, just let us tweak what we say about biology a little bit. | ||
| It's like, no. | ||
| There will be no tweaking of logic itself. | ||
| We are not going to allow you, if we can avoid it, to smuggle one structural contradiction Because once you get one in, it's all over. | ||
| This has to do with the unity of nature. | ||
| I don't want biology to give me many of the results that it gives me. | ||
| Tough. | ||
| Biology is what it is. | ||
| I don't have the right to say, you know, let's say microcephaly, small heads, has no effect on intelligence. | ||
| Or that people with Down syndrome are just as capable as anybody else. | ||
| Because it's not true. | ||
| I want it to be true. | ||
| But my wanting it to be true doesn't have that effect. | ||
| And if I start making those adulterations, then the whole thing falls apart. | ||
| So this is sort of where you and your brother, Brett, and your sister-in-law, Heather, and many other people, Jordan, and a bunch of other people have been saying that that's the fear, that if the gender studies stuff and all of this progressive stack gets into science, we literally blow apart All the progress, all the real progress we've ever made scientifically. | ||
| You can't actually make progress on the male-female stuff if you're pretending that males and females are both simultaneously totally different and totally the same. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| And you have to pretend both in order to get this new version of progressivism to work. | ||
| So you're literally smuggling in a contradiction. | ||
| So if you say, look, we really need a diverse workplace, let's say between men and women, and we notice that in this particular occupation it's 80-20. | ||
| And that has to do only with oppression because otherwise it would be 50-50. | ||
| Well, what you've just done is you've said, we know that there's no cognitive difference between males | ||
| and females because we've just assigned all of the difference to | ||
| oppression. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because it would be exactly equal. | ||
| But if you allow males and females to coexist, you're going to get this huge bonanza because now you're | ||
| going to have intellectual diversity. | ||
| Now there's actually something very clever and very important to say that has to do with the kind of Fisher's notion of equivalence of males and females in terms of fitness strategies. | ||
| So there is a kind of equivalence. | ||
| But when you destroy the true biological understanding of why males and females have the same expected return as fitness strategies in favor of this dime store nonsense, you actually destroy the ability to correct for imbalances. | ||
| And so where Brett and Heather and I come down is that we say, in your rush to build utopia, you're going to destroy everything that we've done. | ||
| And you can't take the shortcut. | ||
| That's really what's important. | ||
| Intellectually, these shortcuts will eventually cause the system to collapse. | ||
| And so, it's not that we're not sympathetic with the idea that we'd love to see more female programmers, but let's figure out, and this is actually what DeMoore was focused on, it's like, what changes can we make in order to respect the biology and make this work? | ||
| And so I think that that's what's so confusing, is this push to assign so much to what is essentially an intellectual universe of pure contradiction, is what's offending many people who consider themselves progressives, which is like, I think, absolutely, we progressives are in the right. | ||
| But you have to do it honestly. | ||
| You can't just cheat and pretend things that you wish to be true and close your eyes and put your fingers in your ears and say, I'm not going to listen to data and analysis. | ||
| But do you see any people on the left besides you guys trying to fix this thing? | ||
| Well, yes. | ||
| But they're scared. | ||
| You see, this is what's so terrifying about these current fake progressives, is that they're just scary people. | ||
| They say, oh, we need more empathy. | ||
| And then what are they interested in? | ||
| Are they interested in the notion of progress or justice? | ||
| Well, justice is all about sticking it to somebody. | ||
| Like, you have something that belongs to this other person. | ||
| But progress is just like, let's make things better and hopefully You know, where there is injustice, we can identify a bad guy, but where there's no injustice, and it's just somebody's out of luck, you're just trying to raise people up. | ||
| I want to say one other thing that I realized I forgot to say somewhere else. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Dana Boyd brought up a very interesting issue, which she called strategic silence. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And the idea, which isn't a bad one initially, is that if somebody should not have their voice amplified, let's imagine that you have a manifesto and you decide that you're going to kill 30 people, and in the desire to figure out what the motivation is, that you're going to have your manifesto broadcast all over the world. | ||
| So the Unabomber didn't kill 30, but he killed a bunch, killed a few people and maimed some people, and his manifesto was read widely. | ||
| So strategic silence is the idea that reporters should not be played or used, and they should be silent about certain things. | ||
| I think that what she did not realize is that This much strategic silence cannot function in an intelligent, open society. | ||
| People are simply too mute in the press about all sorts of things that the rest of us have a very legitimate interest in knowing. | ||
| And if you're going to be strategically silent, you should be sharing The idea that the policy of this paper is that it doesn't look at motive on individual instances unless it constitutes a pattern. | ||
| But like if you take terrorist killings, when somebody reports, you know, ten people were killed today and the attacker said something religious in a foreign language, At the end, you're not helping things. | ||
| You're creating a belief that there is some kind of conspiracy. | ||
| And we don't know what that's about. | ||
| Is it an honest desire to protect our vulnerable communities, in which case many of us would be supportive? | ||
| Or is it because the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has some relationship with our government that may be strategic that we want more information about? | ||
| Is that a special favor to a foreign power? | ||
| I don't know what that is. | ||
| But what I do know is, is that if people are dying and that there's a motive that's linking multiple killings, for example, you can't afford strategic silence and pretend that this thing just doesn't exist. | ||
| I think that that's partially where this, our overlords in the institutional class are so Far off is it that they're not realizing that there's no possible way to get a rid to get away with this level of strategic silence And that's what created Donald Trump is that he was willing to break strategic silence Everywhere and people were willing to say look he may be crazy. | ||
| He may be immoral But at least he's not under the thumb of whatever this thing is right, but they're crazy and immoral He's just showing us his crazy and immoral. | ||
| I think that I I think that's the way the average Trump voter felt. | ||
| They're crazy and immoral, these people. | ||
| Trump is probably crazy and immoral, but he's doing it. | ||
| I just don't like being lied to in terms that a stupid child would never accept. | ||
| Because these lies, I need better lies. | ||
| No, I do. | ||
| This is what I talk about, adult-level fiction. | ||
| Are you talking about the lies of the gated institutions, or are you talking about the lies of Trump? | ||
| No, the gated institution narrative. | ||
| I understand that you want to not create an incentive structure so that people murder people so that they can get their message out and amplify it. | ||
| That makes good sense to me. | ||
| And when we get to the point where this thing is big enough, we may have to consider all of the issues that the traditional media had to consider. | ||
| However, what is absolutely not acceptable is nobody from the State Department has ever contacted any one of us and said, hey, I'm a little bit worried as to what you guys are doing. | ||
| Do you understand how this fits in? | ||
| Can you come in? | ||
| You know, we understand that you guys are trying to do good, but let us tell you what U.S. | ||
| objectives are. | ||
| I've never been a part of any conversation like this in the last 20 years. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Vox Solana BuzzFeed thinks we're so dangerous, and yet nobody's getting radicalized in the name of Eric Weinstein. | ||
| Well, but you know, we're also... De-radicalized, perhaps. | ||
| Most of us are patriotic. | ||
| And I will definitely tailor some of what I say To national interests, if I'm aware of what those national interests are. | ||
| But if you're not contacting us, and then you're smearing us, and that's your only means of control, you're not talking about a free society, you're talking about a Potemkin democracy. | ||
| And I'm not going to participate in your Potemkin democracy. | ||
| Either have the conversation, or be prepared that nobody's going to obey your strategic silence, and you can get rid of all of us. | ||
| But you're not going to get rid of the number of people who are going to take our seats. | ||
| And the more force you use to get rid of us, the more you're going to radicalize people in the name of liberty. | ||
| And I think that, you know, this is very important, that this is really a war over sense-making. | ||
| And we have a right to be... I mean, I want to state this rather emphatically. | ||
| This idea of de-platforming sensible, rational people who are smarter than the people who are being platformed, who are more moral, more decent, and saying, well, you can't come in because you're not part of the narrative agreement. | ||
| That's how you get something like the French Revolution. | ||
| And so if you want to say thank you to things like the Rubin Report, we are taking the pressure off of the system. | ||
| You are lying so transparently about so many things that no sane or smart person as an adult can believe. | ||
| And thank God there's some place where people can come and say, I thought I was losing my mind, and then here you guys are, and it's clear that you're not radical, you're not mean-spirited, you're not bad-hearted. | ||
| There's no shortage of PhDs in our system. | ||
| There's no shortage of comedians as an alternate intellectual universe. | ||
| You guys lost the plot in the institutional space. | ||
| Why don't you come out to the comedy store? | ||
| Why don't you come out for dinner the next time we have it? | ||
| Why don't you call us into Washington and say, look, here's what our strategic objectives are, and we'll say, okay, you can't lie that much to people, but what you can do is you can present the truth in different ways and stop making everyone feel like they're being gaslit. | ||
| All right, so here's what we're gonna do. | ||
| I think we've done probably about an hour or so right now, maybe an hour 10. | ||
| We're gonna do about an hour and a half total, just the two of us. | ||
| Then we want you guys in on this. | ||
| So patreon.com slash RubinReport, and whatever level you're at, we're gonna take your questions. | ||
| So jump in on that. | ||
| All this being said. | ||
| Do you think, perhaps, that we're winning? | ||
| And I say winning. | ||
| I've been floating this idea for a couple months now, and it's partly because of what I'm seeing out there with Jordan. | ||
| And when I've been saying it to the audiences, I always say it with a kind of tongue-in-cheek, you know, I think maybe we're starting to win, guys. | ||
| And 3,000 people cheer at once because they haven't heard that before. | ||
| They haven't been around a huge group of people where they can go, These people are all sorts of different. | ||
| I don't know any of these people but we're kind of in on this together. | ||
| Now Jordan always brings up the point often in his talks that it's not about winning per se because if this was a marriage you don't want to beat your wife in an argument because then you're just married to a loser. | ||
| You want to get to a place where you can both maybe have won and lost. | ||
| Maybe you won the argument but there was a lesson learned. | ||
| That's the type of winning I'm talking about. | ||
| I suspect that they now think we are such a huge threat for all the reasons that you've just laid out That they're going after us in crazy ways. | ||
| That, to me, shows we're winning. | ||
| When I saw the veracity of the pieces that came out after this lovely report here, I thought, wow, we're actually bigger than these guys now. | ||
| I don't have hundreds of millions of dollars behind me like Vox does. | ||
| I've got patrons and super chat money. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And it's like, we're doing what you referred to before as this sort of slim thing, which is really cool right now, and there's reasons that it's really strong right now, and maybe we'll all grow. | ||
| Do you mean the ferocity? | ||
| Do you mean the veracity or the ferocity? | ||
| I think I meant the veracity. | ||
| Okay, these are not very truthful reports. | ||
| Well, I meant that there were so many of them. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Wait, give me those two definitions there. | ||
|
unidentified
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What did I say? | |
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| This is why I shouldn't be interviewing smarter people. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Maybe I'm getting it wrong. | ||
| But there's a signal being read by these people like, holy cow, they've got all this money, they've got all this power. | ||
| My rule in general with the intelligence community is whenever you're talking about something sensitive, you should clump around because they don't like to be surprised. | ||
| So when I'm talking about immigration and stuff, I try to make a lot of noise. | ||
| I try to make a lot of noise. | ||
| This alternative network, and the good part of it, which is what I'm focused on, I'm not talking about I don't know, whatever Richard Spencer is saying to baked Alaska, because who gives a shit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The good part of this network has been making a ton of noise. | ||
| Hey, this is important. | ||
| People are listening. | ||
| The events are large. | ||
| People are fanatical. | ||
| And they're normal people. | ||
| We are winning at some level, but we are losing We're not winning quickly enough and clean enough? | ||
| Well, that's what I always say. | ||
| What do I say to you every week? | ||
| We're not moving fast enough. | ||
| Well, OK. | ||
| But this thing has its own pace. | ||
| So somehow, when the gated institutional narrative issues a report that tries to take you all out, Next time, guys, first of all, assign somebody better than Rebecca Lewis because she just doesn't have the chops yet, maybe in five years. | ||
| If you're going to come for us, come loaded for bear and do it intellectually correctly. | ||
| My concern is that the next moves are going to be highly personal. | ||
| Like, how do we take out, you know, you saw this thing with Rogan talking about white farmers in Africa. | ||
| You know, Rogan Says some crazy stuff on his show. | ||
| I'm not sure whether what he said was crazy or not because I haven't looked. | ||
| But I have no doubt that Joe holds some positions that are off. | ||
| I certainly hold positions that are off, and when I find them, I try to correct them. | ||
| But suddenly, the litany of people going after him as if he's a racist because he even talked about this. | ||
| Well, yes, and you know, Rebecca Lewis is very adamant that we shouldn't have gotten angry at Elon Musk for smoking dope on the show. | ||
| We should have gotten angry that Elon Musk went on Joe Rogan because he gave a platform to James Damore. | ||
| And Jordan Peterson? | ||
| I mean, doesn't that tell you everything? | ||
| This kind of bananas inside of this tiny little bubble stuff, they're going to get more sophisticated. | ||
| So just think about it as a video game. | ||
| We've been playing with like lots of low-level orcs on level zero and Okay, so then things got ratcheted up. | ||
| This isn't terribly serious. | ||
| It's going to get more serious, because as the narrative comes to understand just how big these channels are, just how influential they are, let me be open about something. | ||
| Part of the theory behind defining the IDW has to do with my understanding of how demography works in presidential elections. | ||
| So, one way of winning an election is that you find a demographic that nobody knew existed, and then you speak to them, and they're large enough to sway things. | ||
| So, soccer moms. | ||
| Remember soccer moms? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Another one of these things was Karl Rove's discovery of the excerpt. | ||
| Where you have urban, suburban, something, and then rural. | ||
| And between suburban and rural, there was this thing that nobody understood called the exurb. | ||
| And so by finding that, you could find some demographic chunk. | ||
| So both parties let me be very clear about this. | ||
| The IDW nation is quite large. | ||
| It's people who've had enough of low-level lies, they don't mind adult-level fictions that are in the best interests of everybody, but they cannot put up with this level of nonsense coming out of our institutions. | ||
| And part of what's going on inside the institutions is that the institutions have a fake public-facing front and then | ||
| an internal group. | ||
| And this is how they handle things. | ||
| So like, I think Danny Roderick talked about public voice and seminar voice. | ||
| As an economist, you can say certain things to your colleagues, but when you're talking to the public, you have to say different things. | ||
| And unfortunately, they don't even really mirror each other too closely. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so it's OK to lie to the public. | ||
| And so when you talk to an economist and you say, well, you can't possibly believe that immigration and trade are pure positives. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Well, but you just said that. | ||
| Or you allowed your colleague to say it. | ||
| You stated, well, that's what you have to say in front of the public, because they can't follow the analytic arguments. | ||
| Well, OK, that's malpractice. | ||
| That's academic malpractice. | ||
| You're engaged in academic malpractice when you do that. | ||
| Whatever you say to the public has to be a version of what you're saying in private, or you're engaged in some kind of Potemkin statecraft. | ||
| And if the idea is that we can't have a country because, actually, if you took the Constitution seriously, it wouldn't work, then we have to talk about, OK, well, what are we going to do that would work? | ||
| That would actually be viable. | ||
| But right now what we have is we have a bunch of not very intelligent adults who are not very honest, who are sitting in the most important chairs telling us that we're all idiots and we're all deplorable. | ||
| across this political spectrum, and that's not going to work. | ||
| And we are going to win that battle. | ||
| So for all the people that at every Q&A that I do anywhere, either with Jordan or at the stand-up shows that I'm doing, or we got, I think, basically this question, we did a little IDW. | ||
| It was pretty awesome, actually. | ||
| Within a day, we set up an IDW. | ||
| There's an IDW group now, which they're springing up all over the place. | ||
| This one sprung up in New York City. | ||
| We did a room down on Bleeker Street, 300 people, standing room only. | ||
| We did it for free, you know, whatever. | ||
| Are we grifters? | ||
| I know, such grifters who did it for free. | ||
| But putting that aside, the question that consistently comes up is, OK, we get all this. | ||
| People go, you know, get all the ideas. | ||
| We're on board. | ||
| We like what you're doing. | ||
| We want to help. | ||
| We're ready to, you know, show our faces and be part of this whole thing. | ||
| We know there's a technological answer. | ||
| How is it that you morons haven't come up with it yet? | ||
| There's some version of that. | ||
| Like, aren't you guys the ones supposed to be doing it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Well, you and I, I've been talking and working on this in various ways. | ||
| Let's just be honest about this. | ||
| We haven't known when the right time is because the investment in trying to rebuild the infrastructure, and then there's a question about how are you going, you know, if on the other side of this thing, there really is a collaboration between technology, intelligence and media, It doesn't make sense to build the system only to have it torn down by people with special access In a non-competitive non-market kind of a way, but make no mistake This is a viable concept. | ||
| I think it's going to happen. | ||
| I think it's important that it happened before 2020 and the key You know, people should know that there's a lot of billionaire interest in this. | ||
| There's a lot, and I don't mean one person, I mean several billionaires are sniffing around this. | ||
| And I think Ben Shapiro just got this show on Fox. | ||
| I'll be on this Friday. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So this is going to heat up, and I think what's really important is to watch what happens to data in society as this particular report finds its course. | ||
| Because if what we see is that the institutions agree to cite this, because it's a big serious report in a PDF file, Then that's gonna tell us a lot about how far the institutions are gone. | ||
| And you and I differ somewhat, where I believe, I wanna rebuild the institutions because I think it's a shame to, we've got some bad hermit crabs and some perfectly good shells. | ||
| I don't wanna crack the shells just to get at the hermit crabs. | ||
| I think your feeling is that things are so rotten that it might be better starting from scratch. | ||
| Well, I feel that mostly about the Democrats. | ||
| I don't feel that about our institutions. | ||
| So I don't feel that about our academic institutions and things of that nature. | ||
| I think those things, I agree, I want to keep that shell. | ||
| Let's get rid of the bad crabs that are in there, fine. | ||
| But the Democrats, I think it's basically through and through at this point. | ||
| But maybe not. | ||
| And I would be, believe me, if the day comes and I have to eat crow on that one because they came back to sanity and there's suddenly a new JFK and a Daniel Patrick Moynihan and I will gladly ecrow, mea culpa, the whole shebang. | ||
| I think one of the big questions is how do we save the... I've asked before, does this come down to the University of Chicago? | ||
| Are they the only ones who are holding the line? | ||
| On the Enlightenment standards. | ||
| But I think one of the things we should be doing in the academic institutions is having debates where two departments are studying the exact same thing, like gender and sex in biology departments and gender and women's studies departments. | ||
| Or, for example, the wage gap, where you have the economist version of this and then you have, let's say, the women's studies version of this. | ||
| We should be holding debates to bring about the unity of knowledge and so we understand where are we divided if you have two different academic standards. | ||
| I think people would be shocked If they looked at the article which introduced the concept, I think, of white privilege, which was like unpacking the knapsack coming out of Wellesley, if they looked at the... That's where a lot of this stuff was born, right? | ||
| That very piece. | ||
| Some of it was born in that piece, some of it was born... | ||
| The woman's name is Professor Crenshaw at UCLA, the intersectionality, which originally had a very different flavor than what we call intersectionality today. | ||
| It's very important to look at the genesis of these ideas and to look at what is their academic pedigree. | ||
| They're not all terrible ideas, but a lot of them are just heuristics that are fighting things that are much farther down in the stack. | ||
| It's not to maul anybody. | ||
| If the wage gap is really 25 cents, I want to know. | ||
| But I don't trust that the wage gap is $0.25 if somebody refuses to control for things like the choice of what field they get their training or how much kin work they're doing. | ||
| As I've said on this program before, if the problem is that too much kin work is falling to females and that this is uncompensated, we may have to do something which recognizes this real labor that is being done for society in monetary terms. | ||
| Women may need to get paid more. | ||
| Let's make the arguments honestly and let's stop lying about everything, where if you don't sign up for the idea that there's a 25 cent wage gap, which has no known source other than oppression, that you need to be deplatformed and not be able to earn a living because your views are beyond the pale. | ||
| That's moronic. | ||
| I think that's a break right there. | ||
| That was pretty... You were on... You finally focused! | ||
| You know, I do all these shows with you and I'm like, eh, what is he saying, really? | ||
| I want to get back to the Tits, Freud, and Thal Magic Square in Large Exceptional League Group so we never have the chance. | ||
| I really only did that just so in the title we could put Tits, Freud, and Dhalka's Tits on YouTube. | ||
| We never saw what happened with that experiment, whether it got a higher view count. | ||
| Oh, I should check on that. | ||
| Well, you never know how YouTube's manipulating these things. | ||
| Alright, people, here's what we're going to do. | ||
| We're going to take literally one two-minute break. | ||
| We are going to pour whiskey. | ||
| You always say that. | ||
| Do you have to pee this time? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Alright, well then, depending on how long Dr. Eric Weinstein has to urinate, that will be the length of the break. | ||
| We're going to pour some whiskey on the rocks. | ||
| And then we're going to take some questions. | ||
| So patreon.com slash RubinReport. | ||
| We're going to give you guys preferential treatment. | ||
| You can jump in on super chat as well. | ||
| Oh, and by the way, I'm on October 5th. | ||
| I'm going to be at Wise Guys in Utah comedy doing about an hour comedy and there will be a special guest from the intellectual dark web. | ||
| It's a big one. | ||
| I don't want to say who you've joined me for. | ||
| Hey, can you plug, can you, I'm gonna ask for a plug for my new YouTube channel. | ||
| Oh, and you're doing the YouTube. | ||
| And I'm on Instagram because I'm getting, I wanna diversify so that if I get kicked off of Twitter for something, I'm not completely dependent on that platform. | ||
| This is sort of depressing. | ||
| So they did, they put out this alternative influencer network about YouTubers. | ||
| You've put up at least three videos. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You didn't get on it. | ||
| I'm a major YouTuber, man. | ||
| Eric's on the YouTube. | ||
| Is it just slash? | ||
| Eric R. Weinstein, or do you know what it is? | ||
| I actually... All right, we're gonna find it. | ||
| We're gonna comment on the video after the live stream. | ||
| Give us like two minutes, whiskey, your questions, patreon.com slash ReubenReport. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, we're back. | |
| Mm. | ||
| All right, guys, we are back. | ||
| We've got whiskey. | ||
| First off, cheers, my friend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cheers. | |
| Let's see what happens. | ||
| Well, look, because of all the guff that Elon took when he went on Rogan, I think we should tell everybody this is not actually whiskey. | ||
| It's ayahuasca. | ||
| It's ayahuasca. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| On the rocks. | ||
| You wouldn't smoke weed on camera, would you? | ||
| Pardon me? | ||
| You wouldn't smoke weed on camera, would you? | ||
| Never. | ||
| All right, here we go. | ||
| So real quick, we're going to take questions from Patreon people first. | ||
| So RubinSelect, patreon.com slash RubinReport. | ||
| We've got a whole bunch of questions already. | ||
| We'll do some stuff on Super Chat as well. | ||
| I will be at Wise Guys in Salt Lake City on October 5th, daverubin.com slash events. | ||
| And the link's in the description right down below. | ||
| All right. | ||
| What us normies get is that the very personal attacks against famous people are a warning to the normies not to step out of line. | ||
| Do you agree with this? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I've been pushing for a while now. | ||
| Well, in terms of this network diagram, I just, you know, so this guy Cody Wilson, who had the 3D printable guns and defense distributed, so I follow him on Twitter, and there was just an ominous tweet, which is like, Cody Wilson is followed by the following accounts. | ||
| Well, I'd follow Adolf Hitler if he were on Twitter to know what he's thinking. | ||
| I mean, the fact that you follow somebody, if that's evidence of your moral Turpitude and how base and vile you are. | ||
| I mean, for God's sakes, if I was at war, I would tune into my enemies' broadcasts. | ||
| You can't tell anything from that. | ||
| So this is part of the scare tactics. | ||
| And I think that those of us who are trying to be the advance guard have to make fun of this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yes, they are trying to scare you that if you listen to these people, you will be radicalized, you will be unemployable, and Let us take the first few steps and make fun of this, and then it would be great if you followed in behind and made fun of us. | ||
| Made fun of, not us. | ||
| Well, they can make fun of us. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| They certainly do. | ||
| But make fun of this mania about saying, well, so-and-so talked to so-and-so talked to so-and-so. | ||
| And I just want to say one thing about this I haven't gotten to yet. | ||
| The whole concept of a safe space is not about people being triggered. | ||
| That, I think, is false. | ||
| I think what it is is about safety for narratives. | ||
| And so if you have a nonsensical narrative, as you do in any cult, that narrative cannot survive direct contact with outsiders. | ||
| And so if you think about it, it's quite funny that the institutions are actually a cult-like network that aren't confident enough of their opinions. | ||
| I mean, look, I've never taken an econ class in my life. | ||
| I want to tell people that the calculation of CPI on a cost-of-living basis with changing preferences is completely wrong, and I know how to do it, and my wife knows how to do it, and so far as I know, nobody else knows how to do it. | ||
| And if you want to come at me and say that that's nonsense and this is the ravings of an amateur, Name the time and the place. | ||
| I'll show up at any econ department and make that argument. | ||
| That kind of a narrative, which is that you have to have a secret group of people adjusting the CPI because so much is indexed to CPI. | ||
| So billions of dollars change hand when you change the calculation of CPI. | ||
| That's a nonsensical statement. | ||
| And so you need a safe space that says only the experts can understand this. | ||
| That's the same thing that we're seeing with so many of our positions, which is that people imagine that the safe space is about not wanting to hurt people's feelings. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's about not wanting these nonsensical narratives to come into contact with | ||
| intelligent critics. | ||
| And I think that people have to understand that you're being warned away from PhDs, | ||
| from other alternative intellectuals who have a lot to say, like Noam Chomsky, | ||
| because the narratives are being protected. | ||
| So a couple people have asked me questions like this that I've gotten before just now, | ||
| but I did get it here, so I'm just going to sort of paraphrase it. | ||
| I think you saw the moment when I had Shapiro on a couple weeks ago, and we got into the gay cake thing again. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he said he would not bake me a gay cake for my anniversary party. | ||
| He said he may not even come to my anniversary party. | ||
| And I said, my hope is that if we can remain friends for 50 years, I can move you on this. | ||
| Now I understand that I cannot be friends with Ben exactly the same way I can be friends with you | ||
| because of that particular issue. | ||
| We can be friends and friendly and allies in a lot of ways, but there's a separation there for sure. | ||
| But I do consider him a friend who I have differences with and that's okay. | ||
| And I wanna respect his differences and he's not trying to take away my marriage. | ||
| or jail me or take away my things, as people keep telling me he's trying to do. | ||
| I'm curious what you just thought of that exchange, just as watching somebody talk about morals and sin | ||
| and how that's related to your ability to be friends with someone. | ||
| Yeah, I've got a terrible view on this. | ||
| That's why I ask. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| I think Ben is actually being very genuine in terms of the analytics of it. | ||
| it. | ||
| But I don't sense that he's got... | ||
| I think it's a very formal homophobia as opposed to a visceral homophobia. | ||
| Like, okay, there's some passage in the Torah that says this is not good, and so... Well, it says thou should not lie with a man as you would a woman, basically, but I don't lie with women that way, so it's all good. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Let's not make a big deal out of it. | ||
| Okay, so focus. | ||
| So I think that Ben is actually being reasonable and in the same way that as a guy with a fair number of close gay male friends, I know that there are some parties that you guys feel comfortable inviting me to and other parties that you wouldn't feel comfortable inviting me to. | ||
| I'm not sure what you mean. | ||
| I'm not having those parties. | ||
| You can come to any of my parties. | ||
| Somebody whose name would not be known to your audience once said to me, if it's boy soup and there are a lot of twinks running around, you're not going to be the one getting the invitation and I hope you're okay with it. | ||
| So that would be a kind of discrimination that would be for my benefit. | ||
| And I think that this is what happens when Ben brings his own Food to the dinner party you're having he's trying to say How do I integrate into your life in a way that allows me to keep? | ||
| My modern orthodox position, and I actually really valued I agree honesty and I and I just I want to get something across in Ben's defense Which is yeah, it does seem kind of backward and on the other hand it seemed kind of awesome Which was that he was owning? | ||
| That this was a discomfort that was no real bar, in my opinion, to the depth of your friendship. | ||
| And he's just going to be formal about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And by the way, if you hang around with Orthodox Jews, there's a lot of this. | ||
| They're very formal about rules, and they're also very adept at getting around them. | ||
| And so this is exactly what I expect from an Orthodox Jew, is that he is open-minded. | ||
| In some ways, I think he's very progressive on this front, and he's going to be upfront, like, formally, I can't do these things. | ||
| But it's very similar to when I have Muslim friends in, you know, I have Turkish friends in Istanbul, and you're having an Efes beer, and Then you say, hey, you know, isn't it strange that you're a Muslim and you're having this beer? | ||
| And they say, you know, I really shouldn't. | ||
| And they put the beer down for the rest of the meal. | ||
| Or in India, you talk about people being confirmed bachelors that are gay. | ||
| Just give people their formal out. | ||
| And that's the way that they're dealing with their formal homophobia. | ||
| I don't think it's very deep. | ||
| Yeah, and I just thought all these people were like, oh, see, Ruben's such a sellout. | ||
| He's sitting there as someone tells him he's a sinner, and it's like... Well, then when they're ready to come to the adult table, we'll welcome them. | ||
| There we go, all right. | ||
| Well, we answered a couple. | ||
| There's a lot about just, like, how can a business be built around this. | ||
| Eric, I'd love to see you have a discussion with a free market economist like Brian Kaplan. | ||
| Would you be interested in something like that? | ||
| I've had Brian Kaplan on the show. | ||
| He's an ANCAP guy. | ||
| I like those ideas. | ||
| I just like the intellectual place that those ideas go. | ||
| You'd be happy to do that, right? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I talk to Tyler Cowen a lot, and Tyler and I disagree on some stuff. | ||
| You know, just as people should know, the universe of smart, generative people is so small that we don't usually screen each other on ideology. | ||
| We're just so happy to meet somebody who's thinking deeply and is open. | ||
| Or just basically will act in good faith, and then it's like, oh, you think differently? | ||
| Okay, it's all good. | ||
| I didn't know about this, maybe you did, but how do you feel about the nation of Hungary proposing to ban gender studies as a discipline at their universities? | ||
| Had you heard about this? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, I think it's very important to... I would not ban gender studies. | ||
| I think I would do what I just said, which is make sure that you have a uniform standard of scholarship and not... | ||
| a form of scholarship that is friendly to activism. | ||
| You have to make sure that activist scholarship is recognized as something other than pure inquiry. | ||
| I mean, are you capable of disseminating a finding that you're very upset to find? | ||
| That's a prerequisite for having professorial privileges in terms of tenure and academic freedom. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'd suspect that there's very little of that these days. | |
| People that truly go in But in sciences, there's tons of it. | ||
| My basic take on the universities is that the heart and soul of a great research university is its hardcore discipline. | ||
| We've done much more in those disciplines than anybody else. | ||
| And so, who are you and get out of my lab is an important principle. | ||
| And as long as we have something that keeps bad scholarship from You know, bringing the principle of explosion, as we talked about before, into the sciences. | ||
| We should start exporting scientific notions of rigor, and we should be holding debates between disciplines to make sure that everything is of a piece, rather than saying, OK, well, you have no wage gap, and you have a wage gap. | ||
| We don't even know if it's the same word. | ||
| So I think that it's a bad move. | ||
| Instead, what we should do is we should make sure that all of these... And by the way, if Gender Studies has figured out some things that the biologists don't know, we have to take our lumps in biology. | ||
| There's no fix in that game. | ||
| Do you have any recommendations for having a more epistemologically honest, responsible conversation? | ||
| I think that the ante is much higher than people imagine. | ||
| I think about I don't know why I do this, but I think about the old shows, Love Boat and Fantasy Island versus Game of Thrones and The Sopranos. | ||
| The ante is a lot higher these days. | ||
| We are smart, and we have long attention spans. | ||
| Don't you put down Love Boat on my show. | ||
|
unidentified
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I have a thing for, I carry a torch for Julie. | |
| But, the cruise director. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I got it, I got it. | ||
| I like to ask her. | ||
| To each his own. | ||
| I think that people have to understand that if you want to behave in a more epistemically consistent fashion, you're going to need to budget one or two orders of magnitude more brain space, because most of the heuristics that have been pushed out are completely unworkable in our modern world. | ||
| And once you open up that brain space, once you say, okay, I'm going to follow Game of Thrones for season after | ||
| season and episode after episode, you're having a much better time than you ever had with | ||
| shows that had to have their entire narrative arcs conclude within 30 minutes. | ||
| And that sadly, they did that on Love Boat. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Like, it's like, you got an hour. | ||
| Yeah, we're going to do this and we're going to wrap this thing around in 40 minutes and there you go. | ||
| Eric, what do you think about a potential satellite-based internet solution? | ||
| Because it seems like ISPs are going to start banning content over landlines. | ||
| I mean, this goes to all the technological things that people are talking about. | ||
| Well, right. | ||
| So you tell us how much you want to persecute us and then you'll cause the development of Look at you, free market guy. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I just want people to be happy. | ||
| Free market, okay. | ||
| So there's a lot about that. | ||
| Is there anything to be done with social media and funding platforms and payment processors who are in the censorship business? | ||
| It's sort of the same question. | ||
| You can give me something on that while I'm looking here. | ||
| Look, there are some very serious problems that the major platforms are facing that we are not facing. | ||
| And I think it's very important for us to recognize that once you break it, you've bought it. | ||
| So if we start our own thing, there are going to be all sorts of intellectual half-measures that are going to have to happen. | ||
| So we're in a relatively luxurious position riding on top of somebody else's platform and they're handling the problems. | ||
| I do think there are going to have to be innovations, as I said earlier. | ||
| There's something I forgot to say that's very important that I'm just going to shove in here. | ||
| There's this talk about whether or not Google is biasing search. | ||
| Oh, I'm glad you're bringing this up. | ||
| Let's really do this. | ||
| We should have done this in the first part. | ||
| My bad. | ||
| Google is biasing search. | ||
| And the way in which they're able to say, we don't bias search is how they bias search. | ||
| So people need to look up ML fairness, machine learning fairness. | ||
| Google has released a video and they talk about their need to unbias search. | ||
| That's how the bias is coming in. | ||
| This is that Google is acting, and I think I said this in a tweet, as an incompetent ophthalmologist. | ||
| You have a very mild case, let's say, of astigmatism or myopia. | ||
| And Google says, oh my God, you're suffering from some terrible nearsightedness. | ||
| Your eyeballs are all misshapen. | ||
| Here, we're going to give you the craziest, thickest glasses you can imagine. | ||
| Now, you're blind as a bat when you're putting those on. | ||
| But from their perspective, they're helping you Unbias your bias problem. | ||
| Can you just, for people that haven't got this, can you explain why they think unbiasing makes sense? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It is definitely true that physics, let's say, used to be a much more European-dominated male activity. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| It was. | ||
| Now, it is less so now, but it is still very often dominated by men who are fair of hue. | ||
| Their perspective is, well, that's a bias because in the past that's what physicists looked like. | ||
| So if you do an image search, we should be correcting for that bias. | ||
| So we're going to show you Neil deGrasse Tyson. | ||
| We're going to show you Stefan Alexander or James Gates. | ||
| They're showing you African-Americans and then maybe Shirley, what's her name, Shirley Jackson, a black female. | ||
| And so suddenly you're saying, wow, this is really crazy. | ||
| I'm doing the search on physicists and I'm seeing all black faces or something like this. | ||
| And so what they're doing is that they're claiming to undo latency bias, which is the data hasn't caught up to the world that will be where things are much more equal. | ||
| And so we've just fit you with a prescription. | ||
| But you're looking at this and saying, Wow, you're really biasing your data in order to have a social justice agenda. | ||
| And so, whatever's going on with Donald Trump, he's not saying the magic words. | ||
| The question isn't to Google, are you biasing your data? | ||
| The question to Google is, are you unbiasing your data? | ||
| Tell me how you're unbiasing your data. | ||
| And the phrase that pays is ML fairness. | ||
| I should also say that anybody who knows engineers within YouTube and Google and all of these things, knows that some of them are very unhappy. | ||
| And some of those very unhappy engineers are talking about all of the ways that they're being forced to degrade the product and to privilege certain sources. | ||
| Like, I've seen a list of rankings of various news sources as to how authoritative they should be. | ||
| And so, no surprise, very liberal institutional medias It gets very high rankings. | ||
| And so from their perspective, no, this has nothing to do with politics. | ||
| It just has to do with biasing authoritative sources. | ||
| That has everything to do with politics. | ||
| The fact that you think it's authoritative. | ||
| Please just open this up so the rest of us can toggle these switches. | ||
| Because if you're going to tell me, I mean, I know that a lot of things in the New York Times happen to be true. | ||
| But I also know that it has a very strong ideological bias at the moment that's getting worse. | ||
| And so I don't feel the same way about privileging the New York Times. | ||
| I think this is something else that I want to talk about. | ||
| authoritative sources that we can use as baseline at the moment. | ||
| And it's a little bit like having a dollar-denominated fund at a point when the dollar is falling or rising rapidly relative to everything else. | ||
| If you are referencing yourself, like Wikipedia says, we accept authoritative sources, and then there's some activist that gets into one of the sources that they consider authoritative, And then Wikipedia says, OK, well, we have to print this because it occurred in an authoritative source. | ||
| That's why the danger of letting the Sarah Jongs of the world in their activist role is because we now don't know what an authoritative source is. | ||
| I would say that there are no authoritative sources of an institutional nature at the moment, because all of the institutions are scrambling. | ||
| And quite frankly, this is the one thing that keeps me up at night. | ||
| And the whole IDW concept was an answer to the question, from where will we reboot when this madness is over? | ||
| Like, it's not going to be from departments and universities that have been taken over by activism or news organs or political parties. | ||
| It's going to be from individuals, and I think that the thing that is most authoritative right now are the individuals with a lot of surface area who are pretty trustworthy. | ||
| Do you think there's a cutoff point for the individuals who are the good guys inside? | ||
| I'm not just talking about the average person right now. | ||
| For the people that are inside that get it, but that are cowards right now. | ||
| And maybe for good reasons. | ||
| Don't say cowards. | ||
| That are acting cowardly. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Or that are afraid for a litany of good reasons. | ||
| But Dave, I don't want to say cowardly. | ||
| I'm just going to push back. | ||
| So you know I'm a little more frustrated with these people because they privately come up to me all the time. | ||
| But you know what the thing is? | ||
| How many nights do I wake up in a cold sweat? | ||
| Like, oh no, what's going on? | ||
| When they come for you, it's merciless and it's life-destroying. | ||
| So I don't think these people are cowards. | ||
| Take on the level of risk that you can afford to take on. | ||
| If you've got two really young kids at home and you're just getting by on a gig economy thing, don't do it. | ||
| Don't. | ||
| Stay at some level safe enough that you can meet your obligations. | ||
| But if you happen to have, as Joe Rogan says, F.U. | ||
|
unidentified
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money... But that's not it. | |
| It needs to be more than just the F.U. | ||
| money, people. | ||
| No, if you have a little bit of F.U. | ||
| money, you don't have to have eight figures of wealth. | ||
| If you're in a position where you have very few dependents, And, you know, you do GoPro videos with extreme skateboarding on weekends. | ||
| You're already taking major risks. | ||
| Get in here. | ||
| Help us out. | ||
| Don't be a pussy about it, right? | ||
| Do you think there's a cut-off point, though, for certain people? | ||
| Like, once we fix things, then if you didn't get on board... I mean, I know we'll always have a hand out there. | ||
| Everybody read Timur Kuran's private truths, public lies. | ||
| Because the idea is you have some number of people who are willing to go first, And then you have some people who are willing to take on slightly less risk, but they're really right in behind you. | ||
| But the thing is, is that we need more people. | ||
| Evaluate your risk. | ||
| If you can afford to join us, join us. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| But look, there are people who are being cowardly. | ||
| They have all the advantages in the world, and they won't step up. | ||
| I'm not gonna say... Those are the ones that I'm pressing to. | ||
| If not the average person, obviously. | ||
| Yeah, but I don't want to antagonize our people who are saying, like, you know, If I lose my job, how do I provide for my children? | ||
| We don't need you yet. | ||
| Of course, and I'm not talking about those people. | ||
| You know, when there was a dinner we got into where it got pretty heated because there was a certain set of very wealthy Hollywood people that are down with what we're doing and they won't do it publicly. | ||
| And I was the one that was pretty... It's what Morpheus says to Neo. | ||
| He says, I'm not going to lie to you, everyone who has ever faced an agent has met their end. | ||
| But sooner or later, somebody's going to have to, and when it's time, you'll be able to. | ||
| Okay, well, you have people who are going to try to fight the agents first, and the least you can do is don't undermine the people who are taking the risk in order to sell them out, to feed them to the crowd, right? | ||
| So don't be cipher. | ||
| Right, because you think it gives you a little more time. | ||
| Right, but in general, If you don't have a lot of obligations and you've got a little bit of change in your pocket and you don't need that much, get in here and help. | ||
| Dave, have you ever had to have Tosh.0 on the show? | ||
| Seems like a guy who benefits from free speech. | ||
| I don't think we have tried. | ||
| I will look into that. | ||
| Oh, I like this one for you because this is a very Jordan Peterson question. | ||
| Eric, I have a three-month-old. | ||
| How do you raise a responsible, critical-thinking son in this polarized, post-modern world of bananas? | ||
| Well, first of all... Do something like Peterson. | ||
| Give me some hand motions, a little of this. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Jordan's Jordan, I'm me. | ||
| Alright, fine. | ||
| You know, I kept my son off of social media. | ||
| Just introduced him on my channel. | ||
| And Zev has just opened his own channel, so check that out. | ||
| The thing I did was I took my children as seriously as they deserved to be taken as soon as they were ready. | ||
| And I was astounded Really, at how quickly a smart child's mind comes online ready to deal with things. | ||
| And I think I remember... When was Sandy Hook? | ||
| It's over two years ago now. | ||
| It was a school shooting and I talked to the children about risk extensively. | ||
| And they weren't that disturbed because they had an intrinsic sense that the odds of anything happening in their school were quite low, but that there is no guarantee. | ||
| And, you know, if I think back on all of the crazy conversations I had with my two children, a daughter and a son, Be prepared that it's not just children say the darndest thing. | ||
| Children are ready for much more adult interaction while still being their adorable childlike selves. | ||
| And don't be afraid if you find yourself in a conversation that you can't believe you're having with a three- or four-year-old. | ||
| Both of those happened with my children. | ||
| I remember when I was away I taught myself to play the Vivaldi Largo movement from a guitar concerto. | ||
| And my daughter said, I miss you, Daddy. | ||
| And she said, listen to this. | ||
| And she played it on violin. | ||
| So I knew she wasn't getting it from sheet music. | ||
| And I just thought, like, OK, what, you're five? | ||
| You're six? | ||
| I don't remember what age. | ||
| Your children are going to astound you. | ||
| Take it seriously and don't treat it as if it's adorable. | ||
| Treat it as if it's serious. | ||
| Well said. | ||
| There's a lot of Peterson-style questions here. | ||
| You want to keep going on that? | ||
| Whatever you want, yeah. | ||
| If what Peterson has said is true, that we're living in a 13-year-old girl's reality, and most of the people who want to de-platform the IDW are possibly emotionally stuck, is attacking their ideas directly effective at all, or is there any value in starting an emotional discussion? | ||
| It goes on a little bit more from there, but we'll go from there. | ||
| I think that, and this is something I said at the end of our performance in New York, on that panel. | ||
| If you can, if you're in a position to love your opponent out of their cult, do that. | ||
| You don't have to always return costs and assume. | ||
| Very often you're dealing with frightened and scared people who don't realize that they're much more resilient than they think, they're stronger, the world isn't as hostile. | ||
| People form completely insane ideas about what they're up against and You know, I remember my de facto uncle, Mike Brown, who used to invite us onto his island up in Washington State, I think was a Republican, I'm not positive. | ||
| He was like the kindest, most generous person I could imagine. | ||
| And people who came to the island who had very strong left-of-center ideas had this idea that somehow Republicans were all selfish. | ||
| I can't tell you how common that belief is. | ||
| And I'd have to point out, you realize that your host, who's providing everything for you, and is just the kindest, best person who'd give you the shirt off his back, is voting in a way that you would think of as selfish because he wanted low taxes and he believed that this was the best way to help people out of poverty is to give them self-reliance. | ||
| Try, yeah, I really believe that in some sense, set an example and try to show people that who they think they're dealing with isn't who they're dealing with. | ||
| Have you guys discussed the possibility of this movement becoming a third political party? | ||
| Is that actually even possible? | ||
| We sort of hit on this. | ||
| I don't think it should be a third political party. | ||
| I think it should infect both political. | ||
| I think our system of selective pressure is determined by the Constitution. | ||
| More or less selects for two parties. | ||
| Whether it's Democrats or Republicans or the Whigs come back, doesn't matter. | ||
| The key thing is that we on the left need you on the right To be responsible, and you need to know you have a party on the other side. | ||
| And I think that was the magic where Ben Shapiro, after the joint appearance, came to me and he said, you know, Eric, the thing that I fight on the left is these claims that the market or society is all off. | ||
| And he says, when you come in with a highly specific complaint about some aspect of the market or an oppression or something like this, he says, I'm absolutely willing to listen. | ||
| And I thought, wow. | ||
| This is how we do it. | ||
| The left takes out its garbage on the extreme left. | ||
| The right should take out its garbage on the extreme right. | ||
| And you'll start to see... I think Ben, for example, engages in a certain amount of lib baiting that he'd love to stop. | ||
| And it's really targeted on the extreme. | ||
| It's not targeted on the center. | ||
| And I think he would come in. | ||
| The center, on left and right, needs to go fight its own wings that are polarizing everything. | ||
| But the IDW doesn't live in one party, and it's not a separate party. | ||
| What it is, is an agreement about what constitutes a conversation, and what constitutes a legitimate argument. | ||
| And part of the rap against us is that we're snowflakes, and that we don't want to talk to people who think things that are very different from us. | ||
| In a weird way, I think we don't want to talk to people who have really novel ideas about what constitutes an argument, because we have a clear idea of what constitutes an argument, and everybody's willing to submit. | ||
| Okay, you got the better of me. | ||
| I remember a particular moment where Sam Harris got the better of me in my first podcast with him. | ||
| The key thing that we don't like is when you just make up your own logic. | ||
| You're not entitled to your own logic, and you're probably not entitled to your own facts, and you're probably Not entitled to just go off on your own epistemically inconsistent tangent to get all the goodies. | ||
| Once you meet some of these criteria, I think we'll talk to more or less anybody who's got a decent heart and a desire to figure out what would generally be seen as best for society, but it should have both a left and a right. | ||
| I'm not interested in it becoming a third party. | ||
| I like that you called it an agreement. | ||
| I don't think I've ever heard you say that before. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| All right, so we're going to take a couple more on Rubin Select. | ||
| It's patreon.com slash rubinreport. | ||
| And then we're going to keep drinking whiskey. | ||
| Eric, what do you make of the metaphysical implications of the Big Bang? | ||
| Not a lot. | ||
| Well, give me one more sentence on that. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| When you solve Einstein's equations, there are two essential singularities that you encounter. | ||
| One is the black hole singularity that you associate with a collapsing star, and the other one is the Big Bang initial singularity that you associate with the beginning of the universe. | ||
| And really, in some sense, what they tell us as mathematicians, and I'm going to take some guff for saying this, but is that Einstein's equations aren't the end of the story, because they probably wouldn't have these defects, if you will. | ||
| And so there's the big bang that occurs with respect to the moment of last scattering, or however you want to think about what you can observe. | ||
| And then there's the initial singularity, which has to do with the Einstein equations. | ||
| In general, you don't want to make metaphysical inferences around the points of your model which are least reliable. | ||
| Wait, just for the simpleton on this one. | ||
| So the argument would be that if these were perfect theories, that the Big Bang and basically wormholes wouldn't exist? | ||
| Well, not wormholes, but like black holes. | ||
| Schwarzschild singularities. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's what the argument is? | ||
| Yes, that those are the signs that you're not done yet. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| And so the problem is some people become very attached to the idea that they should be investigating those for metaphysical implications, but likely all your work is going to be wiped out when a better set of equations becomes available if you're trying to make metaphysical meaning out of that. | ||
| So it's super tempting and the reason to do it would be that you wanted to push the equations So hard that they broke so you could find the true ones. | ||
| That doesn't bother me at all. | ||
| But don't spend too much time thinking about something in a system pushed beyond its domain of reliability. | ||
| All right, here we go. | ||
| Two more, because we got some stuff to do tonight. | ||
| I'm just a regular dude. | ||
| Other than daily exercise of basic critical thinking, what is the role of regular dudes like me improving the quality of sensemaking amidst the corrupted institutions you've been discussing? | ||
| The regular guy, not the fuck-you-money guy. | ||
| First of all, I've never met a regular dude. | ||
| My belief is that everybody has something extraordinary in them. | ||
| So first of all, stop claiming you're just a regular dude unless it's your false modesty. | ||
| And then the question is, if you're already here asking these questions and you're a patron of the Rubin Report, think about yourself as already in a tiny minority and take on some goddamn responsibility for where you want to steer this thing and ask for help. | ||
| Pick up an oar and start rowing, man. | ||
| All right, one more. | ||
| I'm gonna go to Super Chat. | ||
| This is Tim Pool. | ||
| Do you know Tim, by the way? | ||
| I've never met him, although I think he's reached out to me. | ||
| Yeah, so Tim is doing great work. | ||
| He's actually an honest journalist. | ||
| Is he on the graph? | ||
| Yeah, he's on the graph. | ||
| He's like in the freaking dead center of the graph, and from what I understand. | ||
| To Tim Pool, reactionary journalist. | ||
|
unidentified
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I can hear laughter in the controller. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, we know what part we're using as the promo now. | ||
| To Tim Pool, the half-Korean white supremacist. | ||
| It's also stupid. | ||
| And also, by the way, I think for the record, if I'm not mistaken, some of the connections that they actually had to Tim don't even exist and a bunch of other stuff. | ||
| Tim said in Super Chat, they know they're lying about our views. | ||
| This is the death rattle of an archaic media system. | ||
| We didn't really talk about their bad intentions enough, I think, perhaps. | ||
| Because I think you always... and I try to, I try not to judge people's intentions. | ||
| He's going right to their intentions here. | ||
| They know they're lying, they know what they're doing. | ||
| They know they're lying and they think that they're doing it in the service of something beautiful. | ||
| Yeah, well... And the problem is, just... | ||
| The reason I'm left off of this graph with this white supremacist Korean Tim Pool. | ||
| And again, I'm so sorry about that. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| If they would have asked, I would have said you, your brother, everybody. | ||
| I was too busy trying to organize Nuremberg-style rallies. | ||
| The reason that they leave us off is because they can't handle the fact that you have like a Bernie supporter who's never voted Republican in this supposedly reaction. | ||
| They're going after Tim Pool like children, and they're trying to find something that sticks. | ||
| Alt-right doesn't seem to work. | ||
| Extreme right, reactionary, this, that, and the other thing. | ||
| Let them empty their revolver, because they don't really have many bullets left. | ||
| Yes, they know that they're lying, but they think they're lying in the service of good. | ||
| I might lie in the service of good if the good were extreme enough and the lie were small enough. | ||
| So don't get upset with somebody just because they're lying in the service of good. | ||
| Of course they know they're lying, and of course they think they're doing it in the service of good. | ||
| But the point is, we're going to have to live with each other as a nation. | ||
| And we're going to have to love each other. | ||
| And there are a lot of people with this mimetic complex in their mind. | ||
| This is why I went and I talked to Kanye. | ||
| I thought what Kanye was going to do was de-Trumpify MAGA with people who wanted their towns in Ohio and western Pennsylvania to start working again. | ||
| People who were drinking themselves silly feeling that they were part of the American dream and got sidelined. | ||
| We are going to have to find common cause and it's just not that hard. | ||
| You know, it's just not that hard to have a friend whose hue is different than yours. | ||
| It's not that hard to have a friend. | ||
| You and I have serious political differences at this point. | ||
| It just doesn't cause me to want to silence you. | ||
| And so my claim is, is that even though they're lying, and even though they know they're lying, You've got to experiment with love and forgiveness to the best of your ability. | ||
| And I can't tell you that I never lash out. | ||
| I think I lashed out a little bit at Rebecca Lewis, because she was lying. | ||
| She said, it will never not be funny that the entire intellectual dark web is only located on YouTube. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| So the 12 Rules of Life isn't a book that exists, and the Waking Up podcast isn't something that has no video, even if it's It exists on YouTube. | ||
| People listen to it off of YouTube. | ||
| It's not true that we don't have any events. | ||
| Of course Rebecca Lewis is lying. | ||
| She knows she's lying. | ||
| Data & Society is lying. | ||
| These people all know that they're lying. | ||
| But they think that they're lying for some beautiful reason to keep our country together, to make sure that we're not in the hands of a tyrant, to make sure that every child has a shot at a beautiful tomorrow. | ||
| And I'm sorry that they're this confused. | ||
| But have some compassion, because they don't have the compassion. | ||
| When we hear about empathy, okay, the onus is on us. | ||
| They don't have this great empathy. | ||
| They're like, I so care about trans people that I can't care about white people. | ||
| Okay, that gives me a headache. | ||
| You're either empathic and you care about people in general, or it's selective empathy and you really have a lot of hate in your soul. | ||
| So set a goddamn example. | ||
| That's my basic take, which is you've got to love the people who are lying, thinking that they're advancing the world's cause, and you have to love them out of their cult. | ||
| And if we're not willing to take that on, then I don't know what we're doing. | ||
| But I can't always make this high bar that I'm setting for myself. | ||
| I will fail. | ||
| I will lash out at somebody. | ||
| But have a forgiveness narrative. | ||
| There is, in general, no redemption narrative on the left. | ||
| That's why it's not even a religion. | ||
| People say it's a cult, it's a religion. | ||
| Without a redemption narrative, there's nothing. | ||
| If what you're really excited about is sticking it to the man, whoever the man is, You're not fundamentally a good person. | ||
| You're a person who's working through your own personal anger. | ||
| And so, my claim is, is that love the people who are lying against you. | ||
| And figure out what an incredibly powerful weapon that is. | ||
| Because at the end of the day, after you knock them senseless to the pavement, you better offer them a hand up and say, look, it wasn't personal. | ||
| It's just you were threatening our system. | ||
| And I felt like I couldn't communicate to you while you were still in the cult. | ||
| That's where I am. | ||
| I'll join you on that adventure, my friend. | ||
| Ahoy. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Alright guys, that's it. | ||
| Remember, October 5th. | ||
| Wise Guys in Salt Lake City. | ||
| We've got your links. | ||
| You do have a custom name, by the way, for your YouTube channel. | ||
| Do I? | ||
| It's gone! | ||
| It was here before. | ||
| It's up, it's up top. | ||
| Ah, it's Eric R. Weinstein on Instagram. | ||
| And if you just search Eric Weinstein on YouTube, it's on there. | ||
| DaveRubin.com slash events for a bunch of more standup stuff that I'm doing. | ||
| And we're going to Europe with Peterson and a whole bunch of other stuff. | ||
| And Patreon.com slash Rubin Report. | ||
| We're trying to get our Rubin Select members to 5,000 people. | ||
| We got a great community growing over there. | ||
| You want to get dinner or something? | ||
| Sounds like a plan. | ||
| All right, that's it. |
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