Oct. 15, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Joining me today is the author of the Orphan X novels, a comic book writer whose work includes Batman, Wolverine, and the Punisher, and a guy trying to save the Democrats, Greg Hurwitz. | ||
| How's it going? | ||
| It's good to see you. | ||
| That's the scariest one. | ||
| You can write all the thriller novels you want. | ||
| It's worse than the Rogues Gallery. | ||
| It's worse than any Batman villain or evil theory I've ever heard trying to save the Democrats, but you're trying. | ||
| We're going to get to that in a little bit. | ||
| So there's a lot I want to do here with you. | ||
| Let's talk Orphan X first and a little bit just about your work. | ||
| What got you into thrillers? | ||
| You know, the only thing I ever wanted to do is write thrillers. | ||
| And my parents did not let me watch TV when I was growing up unless there was an Alfred Hitchcock movie on or the Red Sox were on. | ||
| My dad's from Boston, so that was religion. | ||
| And so all that I did was read. | ||
| And so I was, like, climbing the bookshelves to get to, you know, Jaws on the top shelf and Stephen King. | ||
| I mean, I was just into all that stuff by fifth grade. | ||
| And I was obsessed with it. | ||
| And I still remember reading Salem's Lot like under my bed with a flashlight. | ||
| I was 25 years old. | ||
| But my parents were out and I remember just being terrified and just thinking, it's insane to me that this guy, Stephen King, can take a combination of familiar words and put them together in an unfamiliar way and elicit this much emotion in me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's the only thing I wanted to do. | ||
| So I started to write these mysteries with crayon illustrations at that age, and I went to college, studied English and psychology, that's where I met Jordan, because I thought that'd be the best combination of majors, and I started my first novel when I was 19. | ||
| You went to Harvard. | ||
| I went to Harvard, yeah. | ||
| You say college, you could say Harvard. | ||
| That place in Cambridge. | ||
| And so basically, I started my first book when I was 19. | ||
| And then I got supremely lucky and sold it, you know, and kind of never had to have a real job. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Does that, is that how it feels to you still? | ||
| Like having a real job? | ||
| Like when I was just looking through your Wikipedia today and all the cool things that you've done and all the comic books that I've grown up, you know, reading and the characters that everybody cares about. | ||
| It doesn't, it doesn't feel real at some point, right? | ||
| I can't believe I get paid to do it. | ||
| Like, I love it so much. | ||
| I sort of wake up and float down the hall to my office on a, you know, barge of gratitude. | ||
| I just, it's so great. | ||
| And the comics were a blast. | ||
| I mean, the comics are like, when you get into Marvel in D.C., it's like that super rich kid who used to live up the street from you, had all the best toys, and you could go to their house and play with their toys. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's Marvel in D.C. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| It's like, do you wanna, I still remember my first call from Marvel, the editor-in-chief, who's a very good friend, | ||
| Axel Alonso, was a fan of some of my books and called and said, you can have sort of any character | ||
| from the Marvel vaults. | ||
| Oh man. | ||
| And I had to be super calm and cool and collected, but my inner geek boy is doing cartwheels. | ||
| I mean, I know you love this stuff. | ||
| And it's like, it's in our cells. | ||
| And so I said, you know, I wanna do the Punisher, 'cause the Punisher was the end all, be all. | ||
| And there's a lot of Punisher in Orphan X, too. | ||
| I mean, you can, a lot of Batman, you can see those. | ||
| And basically I wound up writing that. | ||
| They wanted someone from outside of comics because Garth Ennis had completed his legendary run and they wanted to kind of reboot it. | ||
| And I still remember I had this totally surreal experience where I went to the bookstore right here in Ventura, I'm sorry the comic book shop, and I could no longer buy my favorite comic because I was writing it. | ||
| Like I already knew what would happen in it. | ||
| And it was completely surreal. | ||
| Wow, that's weird. | ||
| There's a comic book in there somewhere. | ||
| Yeah, it was wild. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So are you more of a Marvel guy or a DC guy? | ||
| I have to ask. | ||
| I don't know that you legally can answer that. | ||
| You're more Marvel, yeah? | ||
| I'm more of a Marvel guy. | ||
| I am more Marvel with the exception of Batman. | ||
| I mean, I love Hulk, Spider- I was a hardcore Spider-Man like you. | ||
| And I had every Punisher appearance. | ||
| What do you make of sort of the way the movies have gone down? | ||
| Because it's so clear that Marvel has just figured out how to do these movies correctly. | ||
| And at least from my opinion, DC, although Wonder Woman, the standalone, was good, like they just can't quite get the thing right. | ||
| Although the original Batman, the Christian Bale Batmans were incredible. | ||
| Well those Batmans... | ||
| So I wrote Batman the Dark Knight, which you have here. | ||
| So my Batman series was very much, has an homage to those films. | ||
| It wasn't the main Batman title, just Batman. | ||
| It was Batman the Dark Knight. | ||
| And I was very focused on reinventing the villains. | ||
| I love villains, and I love dealing with darkness and giving them a very legitimate viewpoint, which is probably part of the perspective shifting that I think that I'm capable of doing in politics. | ||
| I can see a lot of other sides and a lot of valid reasons for it. | ||
| Well, I can also see this is why you can, you know, do some things with Jordan, because he always talks about you have to give the devil his due, and I guess you really have to do that if you're gonna write a good villain, right? | ||
| Oh yeah, I mean the bad guy never thinks he's the bad guy, right? | ||
| So it's like the more, I think younger writers, and me included, you know my early stuff, it's like the worst possible serial killer, villain, you think that makes your guy a better force for good. | ||
| And what you realize is if you can actually build a steel man instead of a straw man, like someone who has a reasoned rationale and worldview that we almost start to relate to as a villain, like it's right there. | ||
| And then your guy defeats him even through that chaos and ambiguity, that actually accrues way more positively to your protagonist than if he's just, you know, tracking serial killers all day. | ||
| Because serial killers inherently aren't that interesting from a narrative perspective, because it's like, why'd he do it? | ||
| Oh, he's insane. | ||
| You know, if you can find people with a real rationale, which is what I do for, it's what I really do in the Orphan X's, but I did that with Penguin, with Scarecrow, with, you know, the Mad Hatter. | ||
| I tried to give them an inner life that shows the reflection of Batman. | ||
| It's sort of like that Buffalo Bill wasn't really the interesting bad guy in Silence of the Lambs, it was Hannibal Lecter, right? | ||
| Like the psychopath, or the straight up murdering psychopath wasn't the guy. | ||
| It was more about the intricacies of the psychological piece. | ||
| Well, and that's structured like a love story, right? | ||
| That's a love story between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Didn't end that well for... Well, for them it did. | ||
| For them it did. | ||
| It didn't end that well for the guy who ran the jail. | ||
| But I mean, there's a dance and there's a flirtation and so it's very much about them, you know, it's this very weird twisted foray into intimacy between two opposite parties. | ||
| And so it's structured out like a romance. | ||
| We should recut that as a rom-com. | ||
| I'm sure somebody's done that on YouTube somewhere. | ||
| So for somebody that's interested in stories and these archetypal characters, and as you know, I'm on tour with Jordan Peterson right now, how much truth do you think people can get out of these stories? | ||
| Because Jordan's always talking about, you know, the truth that you can extrapolate from religious stories, but then also does relate it that you can get truth from well-written fiction, like, you know, he talks about Harry Potter a lot, or the story of Pinocchio, or just different things. | ||
| When you're writing these things, are you really keeping that in mind? | ||
| Yeah, you know, that's a really interesting question. | ||
| I mean, I believe... | ||
| I'm a hardcore Jungian. | ||
| I mean, I first studied Jung under Jordan. | ||
| My thesis, if anybody—like, if Ambien doesn't work, my thesis was Ferdinand Jungian analysis of Shakespearean tragedy. | ||
| I mean, I posit that Shakespeare was—his tragedies are like perfect thrillers, right? | ||
| They're highly structured, convention-bound, reinterpretations of past themes that are narratively driven, of lust, intrigue, and murder, designed to appeal to the broadest possible cross-section of people. | ||
| Um, but I'm a hardcore Jungian in that I do believe that the hero myth is as essential and evolutionarily selected as opposable thumbs and eyelids. | ||
| Like, you can find a tribe cut off from all human contact buried deep in the Amazon, and you know they're gonna have opposable thumbs, you know they're gonna have eyelids, and you know that they're gonna have a hero myth with all the constituent parts. | ||
| So then the question is, well, why? | ||
| And so, what I believe is that I mean, what I believe, what Jung believes, what Jordan talks about a lot is that there's essential wisdom that's embedded that in my mind is a more real truth than the kind of truths that we deal with on the surface in a lot of ways of how to contend with the unknown both internally and externally. | ||
| So you buy, if we were looking at the sort of Sam Harris, Jordan debate on this, you buy Jordan's version of that, that it's beyond just fact that can give us truth. | ||
| It's that there has to be some other sort of story on top of that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think we're story processing and story making machines. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That you can't get value out of just fact alone, basically. | ||
| Yeah, I mean you need to embed something in some archetypal structure. | ||
| So I always think of it like we're preconditioned to have, and you know it's complicated because people think when you talk about the Jungian collective unconscious, people think that like somewhere floating in our prefrontal cortex is a notion of a wizened old woman as representing wisdom. | ||
| But I don't think it's that. | ||
| I think that there's a story engine that is selected that drives people to say, | ||
| okay, I need a representation for wisdom. | ||
| So if you look around your village or your city or your community, that will tend to land | ||
| on somebody who's older. | ||
| Like it's ingrained in them. | ||
| So there's different choices that happen. | ||
| I don't believe that there's sort of essential specifics that are floating in our head, | ||
| but the mechanism to make meaning is in there. | ||
| And the mechanism to look at different things that are in the world around us and to plug in symbols | ||
| and to make them construct a certain way. | ||
| And that's why if you look at like the Epic of Gilgamesh, It's a direct overlay for The Terminator, right? | ||
| I mean, so there's all these overlaps and nuance between the ways that we're used to processing story. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you make of the fact that it seems like the only thing we can seemingly do right in Hollywood these days is make superhero movies? | ||
| Is there some, like, extra meaning to that right now? | ||
| Like, we're making blockbuster after blockbuster, or at least Marvel is just blowing it out of the water with all these things, and we don't seem to be making a lot of new original stories anymore. | ||
| Well, I'm a little... | ||
| I'm divided on that. | ||
| I mean, my favorite movie last year was Wind River. | ||
| I don't know if you saw it. | ||
| I didn't see that. | ||
| I don't think I heard of it. | ||
| Taylor Sheridan is the writer-director. | ||
| He also wrote Hell or High Water and he wrote Sicario. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| So there's interesting work that's being done. | ||
| I mean, I think there's a preponderance of superhero stuff because as we are sort of laying waste to some of the structures | ||
| that have protected us in a lot of ways, it's sort of the new gods in the new mythology. | ||
| I mean, in the case of Thor, literally. | ||
| Right, and so I think that it's this overlay for us to contend with and make meaning | ||
| with bigger symbols in our life. | ||
| I mean, it's so weird. | ||
| I love Batman, right? | ||
| You're a Batman guy too, despite being a Marvel guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it was so funny because I was out the other day and there was a guy with like a Batman wallet and a Batman tattoo and a Batman shirt. | ||
| I was like, we're grown men. | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| What does this mean? | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, you have a wallet. | ||
| It's sort of like, is it that different than having a cross around your neck? | ||
| Like, why are we, if you like a comic, if you like a movie, why are we necessarily like Engraining that in our skin, right? | ||
| And having that be on our clothes. | ||
| Like, why would we wear this with a shield? | ||
| I think there's a lot of a sort of religious overlay to what these represent. | ||
| Yeah, well, the stories, right? | ||
| These stories of good and evil and the way Star Wars, at least the originals, affected me. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Or the way now. | ||
| I mean, you can get so much truth and interesting, deep, profound psychological thought | ||
| out of the original Batman trilogy. | ||
| It's incredible. - Sure, yeah. | ||
| Well, it's funny-- - About good and evil and laying waste to the world. | ||
| I mean, that Heath Ledger Joker is just-- | ||
| Amazing. - Perfection, yeah. | ||
| Well, so it's funny. | ||
| So you look at, there's sort of, we have a direct line with Star Wars in some ways | ||
| 'cause you have Young who has a fairly impenetrable canon. | ||
| Like, he's not breezy reading, you know? | ||
| You can read Freud and the case studies read like short stories. | ||
| I mean, so it's obvious for me in hindsight why I studied it, but things never make sense when you're just following things that you love. | ||
| And I was super interested in psychoanalysis. | ||
| And in hindsight, it's like, of course, all Jung wrote about was narrative. | ||
| And all Freud wrote about was interesting psychological case | ||
| studies, which are also narrative-based, and they read like short stories. | ||
| But so you have Jung, who's very tough to penetrate. | ||
| So you have Joseph Campbell, who came along. | ||
| I think of Campbell as like the Cliff Notes for Jung. | ||
| I don't think Campbell has a lot of stuff that if you-- | ||
| like, Jung's tricky. | ||
| He's like, reading Jung, it takes a lot of work and focus. | ||
| So Campbell makes that more accessible. | ||
| And then Campbell had-- that's where Bill Moyer, that famous interview, right? | ||
| And Lucas then specifies that, makes it specific in a way. | ||
| And when you're talking about meaning in stories, It's like, no one will deny you can find meaning from Freud and Jung, right? | ||
| But when that's distilled down into something that's specific, that embodies those principles, that's the thing that's sort of tattooed on our spinal cords in this culture. | ||
| Like, who didn't have that experience with Star Wars? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Who doesn't show up with that? | ||
| And that's because it's taking these things that are literally philosophical, psychological, meaning-making human beings, in these bodies, in these canons, | ||
| and distilling it down to something that everybody can plug into. | ||
| Whether you get it, whatever level you get it at, you get it at. | ||
| Us seeing those at seven is different than us seeing them at 30 or 40. | ||
| Yeah, so when Jordan takes that to the religious place, do you follow that? | ||
| Are you into thinking there? | ||
| Yeah, and I'm from like an atheist Jewish, you know, semi-socialist background. | ||
| You know, like I'm not conventionally religiously raised. | ||
| But it's like to deny that a story is that successful. | ||
| So here's a weird thing that's always an issue that I have with Democrats. | ||
| I know you get very defensive when people have problems with Democrats. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| I'll ease you in. | ||
| But there's this funny thing where Democrats tend to view Other cultures with like great reverence, especially the more exotic they are. | ||
| Even if there's some fundamental issues in the other cultures that should be relevant, right? | ||
| Like you have hardcore feminists who are supporting certain regimes that treat women terribly. | ||
| And you're like, we should jar out of that. | ||
| Like that appreciation for the exotic. | ||
| And the one thing I find frustrating is we have such a collection of different cultures in the United States. | ||
| And it's like, why can't you go to Alabama or the Deep South? | ||
| I love the Deep South. | ||
| Like when I sold my first book, I drove through the Deep South to go to the bourbon distilleries and to see Faulkner's Home. | ||
| And why don't you look at that and people's relationship with the Second Amendment and their relationship with each other and their relationship with their value system as also being a culture that is different that should be appreciated, right? | ||
| It's a weird thing. | ||
| So we do it for the outward world, but sort of not... | ||
| It's consistent enough to be safely exotic, right? | ||
| But if someone disagrees with you, and look, this is true both ways. | ||
| I mean, I'm not merely beating up Democrats, but it's a frustration that I've had to say, people think differently. | ||
| So if you want to pretend that you're going to jump into their brain and make a moral judgment on why they hold their opinions, that's not good for anybody. | ||
| But the same thing holds true for stories. | ||
| It's like going to any university, and it's super cool and hip to talk about, to analyze the Marvel stories or to analyze Star Wars. | ||
| And it's like, why wouldn't you do the same with a story that is so successful that it dwarfs all of those over centuries and centuries, that has given rise to cathedrals and wars, and this is stuff that has moved. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So it's like, if you're into those stories, it's like, ah, that was yesterday, you know? | ||
| Yeah, or like, you know, you're a Jesus freak, and it's like, wait a minute, like, right, a story about somebody. | ||
| Meanwhile, that guy's at the Star Wars convention. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And it's like, well, so what's the story of Jesus? | ||
| Like, if you shoulder your own burden, if you bear your own cross and accept your own suffering, that's the only means toward transforming it. | ||
| Or to transcending it, I should say. | ||
| And so it's like, oh, is that relevant in relationships or psychology? | ||
| Like, what's the best approach if someone's really screwed up and complaining and is a martyr in the whole world? | ||
| Like, you go, yeah, honey, the world's awful. | ||
| Like, is that the parenting that you want? | ||
| Or to say, what are the things you're doing? | ||
| Where are the faults as they exist in you? | ||
| It's one thing the Jews are great at in the Old Testament. | ||
| God's angry, we screwed up, right? | ||
| Jordan says that a lot. | ||
| It's like, where is it centered in you? | ||
| And what is a way that you can accept the conditions and the inherent tragedy of life in a way that allows you to transcend it? | ||
| And it's like, that's played again and again and again. | ||
| I mean, you look at Tony Scott Denzel Washington's Man on Fire. | ||
| And it's like you look at how beautifully, that takes an hour in the first act, just the relationship between him and the girl. | ||
| And it's basically a classic, like you need to become a monster to hunt monsters, but it's the story of his salvation and sacrifice for something innocent. | ||
| That's my favorite modern movie, probably. | ||
| What do you make of the fact that people actually care about this stuff right now, like this type of conversation and being able to relate it to either comic books or movies and still talk about religion or talk about it from an atheist perspective, that people actually care about this? | ||
| Where I think four years ago, if a whole bunch of us had been talking about this, people would be like, what the hell? | ||
| How is this relevant? | ||
| What? | ||
| You guys live in your mom's basement. | ||
| Right, well that's what they'd be saying. | ||
| Covered with snack crumbs. | ||
| Yeah, that may well be true. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| I cleaned up before I came over. | ||
| No, we appreciate it. | ||
| So, I mean, I think what's interesting is there's a letter F. Scott Fitzgerald sent to his editor, and it's great, because he talks about all the notes that you get from an editor, and he said, the American reading public is totally stupid and needs to be led by the nose. | ||
| Or number two, massively brilliant and can interpret every problem that you have. | ||
| Like, it's everything. | ||
| It's this amorphous view that we always take towards society. | ||
| And so there's this view of, like, the American attention span is shortening. | ||
| You look at it like we went from books to blogs to kind of MySpace you had to build out to Facebook to Twitter to Instagram, like this ever-shrinking aspect. | ||
| But it's too simplistic. | ||
| I mean, everything's too simplistic. | ||
| So we have podcasts exploding, audiobooks and publishing exploding. | ||
| And this sort of longer form discourse, I mean, what I think is really interesting is there's a lot of people who are hungry for it. | ||
| I mean, I always say to Jordan, it makes no sense at all that he did a lecture series on the psychological underpinnings of the Bible and more than three people showed up. | ||
| You wouldn't anticipate that. | ||
| But people are a lot smarter and are a lot more oriented in their desire for meaning than we give credit. | ||
| I can tell you that from being on this tour with him. | ||
| In the middle, he'll often say something about how he's working on the next series of biblical lectures. | ||
| It gets a huge applause every time. | ||
| People want more of that. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Whether they're believers or not. | ||
| I think many of the people that watch them and appreciate them actually aren't believers, at least in a traditional sense. | ||
| Well, I mean, and who knows what that means? | ||
| Like, am I a believer? | ||
| Or like, do I believe those stories contain some of the most fundamental grains of first principles of orienting oneself in the world? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So it's like, what does it even mean to be a believer? | ||
| But I mean, the other thing I find really interesting with it is that it's sort of going back to our conversation about archetypes and my belief that it's selected, is we're sort of meaning making creatures. | ||
| And so if there's a discussion that Jordan has, if you guys are in conversation on a stage, or Eric's arguing with Ben, right, you get these opposing views within this group. | ||
| People are engaged in that if it feels like there's a genuine focus for meaning. | ||
| Because it's like that's the thing that we want more than anything. | ||
| And it gets hijacked a lot for the purpose to be like, oh, I just want to be happy. | ||
| And it's like happiness is temporary. | ||
| Happiness is ephemeral. | ||
| So I think that's what's happening with these longer form discussions that people are engaged in is because it feels like there's something real happening. | ||
| And it's not buzzwords and cliches and Facile dismissals. | ||
| It's something that's real. | ||
| It's almost like, also at the same time, mainstream has become so meaningless that our ability to just do this and have a little bit of an exchange, maybe with some differences and some agreements, has that much more value right now, where 10 years ago maybe it wouldn't have had so much value. | ||
| But as mainstream careens off into the abyss, Well, we're still here. | ||
| Well, it's funny too, because in some ways, a reasonable centrist view is now radical. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So if you have a senator who's willing to compromise and interact with the other side to pass legislation, which is one of the tenets of how Congress is supposed to function. | ||
| That's sort of how it always works. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's sort of radical. | ||
| Like if you don't only vilify and shut down from either side and continue to polarize. | ||
| And actually, part of this, I've been thinking a lot about how this is driven with mainstream | ||
| media. | ||
| And you and I were talking a little bit about trying to use the intellectual dark web as | ||
| an ability to sort of broaden out what views are of different parties. | ||
| And it's all heterodoxy-based, but how do we bring in centrist views and have them represented? | ||
| Because one of the things I've been thinking about a lot, I've been doing a lot of candidate | ||
| I've talked to dozens of candidates from, you know, Tennessee to Alabama, like all over the country. | ||
| Virtually no one that I talk to is making it a key aspect of their platform, you know, trans bathrooms and democratic socialism. | ||
| Literally not a one. | ||
| So then it's like, wait, is there a role that we're all playing, you know, even in this umbrella of the intellectual dark web, but then the mainstream media, everyone who's sort of virtue signaling on social media, in starting to think, you know, Eric calls it the Chihuahua effect. | ||
| Like, there's very loud people who are out at the edges, and like, maybe good for them, right? | ||
| Like, I'm not in favor of deplatforming anybody on either edge. | ||
| But there's a huge story in the middle that I think isn't being told. | ||
| And I think it's really important to have the chihuahua effect, not cow everyone in the middle, from being able to sort of speak up and have the discourse that they want to have. | ||
| One of the things I told, I sat down with the Washington Post, and I've sat down with some other places and said, look, count the number of times that you've written about, for instance, Ocasio. | ||
| Right, like, so she won in a very deep blue district. | ||
| Like, good on her. | ||
| Go off in the Bronx and win and see what's gonna work there. | ||
| That's not my proclivity, but I'm not denigrating that. | ||
| But it's like, how many times have you written about her versus Angie Craig, Haley Stevens, Joseph Kopser, Ken Harbaugh, all these amazing former military, pro-business, amazing Democratic candidates? | ||
| Yeah, and I'm guessing that 90% of the people watching haven't heard one of those names. | ||
|
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Absolutely. | |
| And she was all over everything endlessly for weeks. | ||
| And everyone does that. | ||
| So I've been trying to think about why that is the case. | ||
| I would bet if you go to the New York Times or the Washington Post, she's mentioned 10x, 20x these other candidates, if not even more. | ||
| So I think from the right, it makes sense, and the left does this too, so this is not me claiming that the right's the only one who does this. | ||
| It makes sense to paint the party as further left than it is, because it's an easier sort of target to paint the furthest extreme and then denigrate that. | ||
| But with the left, they're doing it also, I think, because there's problems and they need clickbait and eyeballs. | ||
| So I think there's that. | ||
| And I think there's also a sort of curious, there's a curious desire on the part of the left sometimes to continue to be martyred. | ||
| And I don't know if sometimes there's a drive to further the stories that are stories that, in fact, are gonna hurt the left. | ||
| An example of that is when we talk about progress that's being made, there's a lot of progress being made in race relations, for women in business. | ||
| There's a propensity for the left to say, everything's as bad as it ever was. | ||
| Nothing's gotten better. | ||
| And you go, really? | ||
| Like today it's the same? | ||
| This is not to say that there isn't problematic, widespread racism. | ||
| But is it really the same as in, during before the civil rights, | ||
| is it really the same as in Jim Crow, that nothing's changed? | ||
| And it comes, I think, from a concern that if you concede that things are better, | ||
| that everyone will just give up and go home. | ||
| There's like a driver to it. | ||
| And so I think that there's this aspect with how the left engages with progress | ||
| and what candidates that it looks at, that it's almost, and I think the right does, | ||
| has its own version of this. | ||
| There's almost a desire to be constantly upset and outraged or to constantly be under the heel | ||
| of what's viewed as the other side. | ||
| And what I'm noticing a lot in the discourse that is the most advocated or is the most widely spread | ||
| is there's a real sort of martyr mentality that lies beneath the outrage from either side. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| Okay, so let's just back up a little bit there. | ||
| So we come from a pretty similar political background, I think. | ||
| Both pretty much Democrats our whole life, both part of the left, the whole thing. | ||
| I think we differ a little bit now in that I basically think the ship has sailed on this thing. | ||
| I do think That the left has just rotted the Democrats from the inside. | ||
| I get that there are these good people, and I look forward to having many of them sit in that very chair, and I'll hope that some things can return, but I think it's gonna get a lot worse before it gets better. | ||
| You're really trying to help the messaging of this thing. | ||
| Focus, too. | ||
| Yeah, the focus, the messaging. | ||
| But basically, get rid of some of the identity politics stuff. | ||
| Maybe stop doing so much class warfare stuff. | ||
| I think a few other pieces of this. | ||
| Convince me that it's possible. | ||
| Well, you're right, first of all, that I bet if we sat down and did a chart of our political views, I think yours and mine are the closest of anybody In the intellectual dark web, probably. | ||
| You and I are probably aligned on everything from gun discipline to abortion, like if you go down the list. | ||
| And you're right, that the biggest difference is you've left the party, and I'm trying to reign in the party. | ||
| I haven't joined a new party, by the way, just for the record, but I don't consider myself a Democrat. | ||
| The IDW, political party. | ||
| If that's a party, I'll join that party, yeah. | ||
| I'm trying to refocus the party in a way that lives up to the promise I think it has, specifically to win people like you back. | ||
| It's a long road, there's a lot of hurdles, and there's a lot of quagmires. | ||
| We have been, there are a lot of errors that have been made. | ||
| And I think that one of them is, I believe that corruption is a very widespread problem. | ||
| I don't think that the Democrats can continue to make an argument that we're the less corrupt of two parties. | ||
| I don't think that's a winning argument. | ||
| Yeah, I think you could probably make the counter argument pretty easily, right? | ||
| I mean, the Democrats did a lot of stuff against Bernie and Donna Brazile and the questions to Hillary | ||
| and all sorts of other stuff. | ||
| You could argue they're probably more corrupt in certain ways. | ||
| Yeah, that might be another difference. | ||
| I don't even think that's an important argument But put it this way. | ||
| Let's assume, from my perspective, let's just take the leap to say, I believe the Democrats are less corrupt than what is happening right now under this administration and some of the stuff that's going on. | ||
| I don't think we can have an argument that says, "Vote for us. We're corrupt, but just kind of less | ||
| corrupt." I don't think that's a winning argument. And I think if we're going to engage with people | ||
| like you, Libertarians, Republicans, the first thing they're going to say when it comes to | ||
| corruption, validly so, is like, "Oh, you want to clean up corruption? Okay." | ||
| OK, you first. | ||
| That's a reasonable first claim for people who have been in the party and feel that they're lost. | ||
| And so a lot of the hope that I have with the party are these new candidates and voices. | ||
| And it's part of my dismay about the way that it's painted, that the far left is what's getting the most attention. | ||
| Or like the ridiculous mobby stuff that happens on college campuses. | ||
| Like a lot of the attention, it's sort of like claiming that every person who's on the right is a radicalized neo-Nazi. | ||
| It's like... So where is the internal pushback on that? | ||
| Because I can see it this way, that from someone that was always a lefty and a Democrat and a progressive, the whole thing, And now, although I still consider myself liberal, I definitely, if someone sat me for four hours here, I could probably get to the point where I'd say I'm a libertarian. | ||
| I see intellectual flexibility on the right these days. | ||
| I see a libertarian side. | ||
| I see the never Trumpers. | ||
| I see the Trumpers. | ||
| I see sort of the mugged lefties. | ||
| Like I do see like a couple different pillars that are all The what lefties? | ||
| The mugged? | ||
| The mugged lefties, what I would say. | ||
| I feel like a mugged lefty. | ||
| I just got mugged now. | ||
| But then I see a couple different groups that are thought of on the right right now that differ on certain things, but basically are agreeing to disagree. | ||
| I don't see that on the left, but you just mentioned a couple names that you believe are people. | ||
| That's what I think is happening, and it goes to your point about where the oxygen is, but if there's some evidence of it, I'd love to... | ||
| I mean, there is a trail of candidates. | ||
| I mean, I could list 20 candidates, which I won't just rattle off. | ||
| Like you said, people don't necessarily know, you know, Katie Hill and Haley Stevens and Kendra Horn. | ||
| I'm dealing with people every day who are talking about, number one thing is anti-corruption. | ||
| And they're signing, I asked yesterday, I was at an event with six candidates and Adam Schiff, and I said, you know, I'd worked with some of them, I'm working with others, I said, all of you sign on to the Disclose Act. | ||
| The Disclose Act is vowing to name lobbyists, all lobbyist influence, it's all to get money out of politics, which I think is the number one issue. | ||
| business, it's sort of the donor class level and influence of lobbyists. | ||
| I think that's a really big problem. | ||
| And you disclose everybody, you disclose your donors, which I'm going to talk more about | ||
| from a libertarian perspective in a second because I had a very interesting conversation | ||
| with Ben that shifted some of my thinking on that. | ||
| Lobbyists, right? | ||
| Are you going to name all your lobbyists? | ||
| Are you going to come out for protection of the vote no matter what, right? | ||
| Are you going to come out hard against taking PAC money for individual candidates or like bombing the other side through a PAC? | ||
| Anti-gerrymandering, right? | ||
| Which means either a bipartisan committee that does it, which has some problems, or judicial, or I'm increasingly starting to think about that there's a congressional fix. | ||
| Like, it'd be really great to have Congress doing a lot more. | ||
| Imagine if they did anything. | ||
| Right, so it's swearing a bunch of things before they're going forward. | ||
| There's dozens and dozens of names on the list of people who've signed on to the Disclose Act, | ||
| and I believe they're all Democrats. | ||
| They're all younger Democrats with this wave. | ||
| Now, the Disclose thing is troubling for me, 'cause you get stupid stuff like this In-N-Out boycott | ||
| that lasted a day and a half, which if people aren't familiar with it, | ||
| I think somebody, they found out that In-N-Out had donated to Republicans | ||
| and called for a boycott. | ||
| And the best thing in Southern California, everyone's like, dude, that's In-N-Out. | ||
| Like, sorry, that ain't happening. | ||
| But then they found out that they'd given money to Democrats, like the whole thing is this mess. | ||
| And so, and I understand it, and things are also complicated | ||
| like Nike right now has Colin Kaepernick's the face of that, they're calling him the six billion dollar man. | ||
| They rent the ground floor of Trump Tower for 13 million dollars a year. | ||
| Okay, they've given three times as much money to Republicans as Democrats. | ||
| So it's like, who are we boycotting? | ||
| And meanwhile, there's a sandwich chain that just got put out of business | ||
| because the owner took a picture with Trump. | ||
| So it's like, from both sides, it's like, what are we doing? | ||
| Everyone's burning their Nikes, but they're actually paying 13 million dollars | ||
| to rent space and are giving three-- | ||
| Right, they're using sweatshops in, you know, China or Vietnam or wherever, and now suddenly everyone on the left's cool with that because they want to support Nike. | ||
| Right, but also everybody on the right is sort of outraged by this move and they're burning their shoes, but Nike also has given three acts. | ||
| It's like, let's not look for our moral guidance, maybe, from corporations. | ||
| Like, maybe that's a good idea. | ||
| So that's it. | ||
| I would say not your moral guidance, nor from politicians. | ||
| I don't think we should be getting it from politicians or, I mean, people look at politicians now as if they're supposed to be superheroes. | ||
| And they're just people who are middle management, pushing things one way or another a little bit. | ||
| But instead we want people to come in with magical powers and fix things that haven't been able to be fixed for, - Yeah, I mean I think there are certain standards | ||
| to which we want politicians held like we want doctors and lawyers. | ||
| Like there's certain oaths of the office. | ||
| If someone's life is being run by lobbyists, it's like that's a problem. | ||
| But to go back just real quickly to that concern, which is if you disclose everything, | ||
| then people can kind of mob you and boycott you. | ||
| We've seen that from both sides in a way that just becomes a mess. | ||
| And then companies, like one of my biggest protests actually isn't moral, | ||
| it's that it makes everything boring, right? | ||
| It just makes it so dull that anytime somebody takes a, you're a comedian, guess what? | ||
| You live on the edge. | ||
| If you live on the edge, you're gonna say stuff sometimes that doesn't play, or stuff that's offensive. | ||
| Look at Richard Pryor, look at Eddie Murphy, look at Dave Chappelle. | ||
| You know you're a comedian. | ||
| I mean, the whole game is to do that, and maybe you're gonna miss and fall down. | ||
| Now they've got a cell phone in the crowd waiting, just waiting to click send. | ||
| Right, and then there's the craven nonsense apologies to who? | ||
| Like, who is like, Curled in a fetal position in their shower, scrubbing themselves because Dave Rubin made a joke that was mean about something. | ||
| Who do people apologize to? | ||
| And I know that this is an issue. | ||
| I mean, this is one of the other things. | ||
| I know that disclosing is a problem from a libertarian perspective, because why shouldn't people just give money? | ||
| And let's say that somebody's in L.A. | ||
| and they're Christian and they give money to a pro-family, anti-gay marriage group. | ||
| It's like, maybe they don't want to be outed if it means they're never going to work again. | ||
| And so I understand those concerns. | ||
| And so one of the things that I'm sort of discussing and advocating is to raise the floor of that to some number. | ||
| And I don't know what it is, but these are conversations that are being had internally. | ||
| And obviously the Democratic Party is the one pushing all this. | ||
| this is not my invention, but this is something that I find to be important with the candidates | ||
| who we're running to talk about. | ||
| But maybe there's some floor where we say, look, 5,000 or $10,000, give what you want and it's secret. | ||
| But if you're giving over $10,000, you wanna be a political player | ||
| and maybe have the spine to stand behind your money then. | ||
| And I know that that's not, like, I will concede that that is running against the current | ||
| of what a libertarian argument would be. | ||
| But when I'm weighing that against, you know, millions of dark money that no one knows where it's from, | ||
| if it's in the country, out of the country, going up to take out candidates, | ||
| like that's a sacrifice that I'm interested in making. | ||
| Well, that's one of those middle ground things that I think is worth having the conversation about, because I'm not someone that would say there should be no government involvement in any of this. | ||
| So you have to figure out, all right, you're gonna be a real player in this, then maybe that does have to be disclosed. | ||
| That actually does make sense to me. | ||
| Unfortunately, this isn't where you get a lot of headlines of, oh, people are trying to figure out what the fair balance is on what to disclose. | ||
| But wouldn't it be cool? | ||
| You know, it's like we have this thing, and it's one of the things I talk so much about with messaging. | ||
| You walk into a big rally and you say, I believe universal healthcare is a right. | ||
| Everyone's immediately in their camp. | ||
| It's like, yeah, and there's cheering and it's wonderful, or like, there's no way. | ||
| I worked so hard my whole life. | ||
| I paid for my own health care. | ||
| Why can't people do it? | ||
| And what you just said about there's a reasonable ground in the middle, and these are conversations I think that are essential, is like, everything's in the middle. | ||
| It's like, okay, well, you know, we think everyone should have some standard of health care so people aren't dying in the streets in America. | ||
| Right, that's un-American and it's unethical. | ||
| It's also a massive public health issue if people just die and their bodies are rotting in the street. | ||
| You're also paying for it either way. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So what's an economic argument? | ||
| Let's not fight over an abstract notion of whether universal healthcare is a right or a privilege. | ||
| That doesn't actually do anything for people who need healthcare. | ||
| So instead do we look at it and go, okay, Average cost of an emergency room visit is $1,233. | ||
| Hospital passes on to an insurance company who passes it on to us because they're uninsured and our rates go up. | ||
| Or a vaccination is $19. | ||
| So let's have some dollars and cents discussions and let's also talk to people from around the table, even who we might disagree with, about how we get into that. | ||
| And it was interesting because I was on with Jordan And we jumped on the phone with Ben when I was talking through some of this stuff about like, like I was trying to figure out if there's any good argument for gerrymandering. | ||
| Aside from the fact that everyone from either party just gets to keep their jobs, so why would you? | ||
| These are points of interest to me, is like to call someone like you and be like, make an argument for gerrymandering so I can know what it is. | ||
| And so I was kind of having this conversation and getting pushback from Ben about this disclosure thing | ||
| for exactly the in and out reasons. | ||
| And it's like, okay, well, he and I aren't gonna agree. | ||
| It's like his opinion is get all money out of government and then no one's gonna compete for it, right? | ||
| It's a very different solution to the one that I advocate. | ||
| But in hearing that, I think there's a way to address concerns that reasonable people will have | ||
| to say, I wanna give $2,500 through Canada. | ||
| I don't want the whole neighborhood to know. | ||
| Like what if it's more liberal and I'm in Alabama, right? | ||
| What if it's more conservative and I'm in San Francisco? | ||
| And so it's ways to sort of hear where people are coming from and try to figure out ways to discuss that. | ||
| And so the biggest hope, when you said to convince me, for me is this next generation of leadership in the Democratic Party. | ||
| There's amazing, you know, there's a guy, Joseph Kopser in Texas, who 20 years, he was an army ranger, a professor at West Point, went to the Kennedy School, got a degree, started his own business, So this does show why the media, or the way they frame all this, is so much of the problem. | ||
| interesting guy, very common sense geared, goes into churches, goes into Republican strongholds | ||
| and sits down and will have a conversation with anybody. | ||
| You can sit here and hold his own with you. | ||
| So this does show why the media or the way they frame all this is so much of the problem | ||
| because no one has heard of any of these people. | ||
| And if you control the information that we're getting, we're shifting the views on the party. | ||
| And I feel the same way in inverse about Trump voters. | ||
| Like, you're hearing from them and people are saying, it's guys with torches at midnight protecting Confederate statues. | ||
| And it's like, wait a minute. | ||
| I have an incredibly wide array of friends. | ||
| I have a very broad cross-section of friends. | ||
| Who voted for Trump. | ||
| And it's too widespread for me to dismiss everybody as being mouth-breathing troglodytes. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| I have very smart friends. | ||
| I have friends who were in the military. | ||
| A bunch of people made different decisions. | ||
| There's people who think that we need anything as long as it wasn't another Bush or another Clinton. | ||
| I don't care what it is. | ||
| they wanted a disruption. | ||
| And I think that it's really important to look at the way that the media is tailoring that. | ||
| And part of what I think our job is, or people like us, is to sort of cut through that | ||
| and to try and have a conversation about what's really going on. | ||
| And for me with the Democrats, it's like, I can, as I said, I mean, have people sit down or look at Angie Craig | ||
| or Kendra Horn or, you know, Ken Harbaugh, someone I just spoke with last week. | ||
| Another guy was in the military, did an emergency relief organization afterwards, helped 80,000 people. | ||
| You talk to him, he's talking about healthcare and jobs and education. | ||
| He's not talking. | ||
| Would you say that most of these folks are against identity politics and just sort of the general state of when people talk about the left, What it's become? | ||
| Would you say that they're in opposition to what I think are most of the concerning parts of the left? | ||
| The concerning parts, yes. | ||
| I mean, what's hard is... Or at least the parts that we seem to be concerned about, let's put it that way. | ||
| I mean, here's what's hard with identity politics, is it's one of these terms that means very different things to different people. | ||
| So some people are like, identity and that, you know, like I'm African American and have an issue with actual statistics on imprisonment rates or police brutality and ways that that skews is one thing. | ||
| Saying you can't have cultural appropriation and I'm melting down over white male privilege because, you know, Justin Timberlake has a braid in his hair is another thing. | ||
| And all of those are sort of different and chopped up. | ||
| And it's like, for me, nobody, like I haven't had one conversation about trans bathrooms | ||
| or white male privilege or any of these things with the candidates. | ||
| It doesn't mean that they're not more inclined based on their political orientation | ||
| and their big five personality traits, right? | ||
| Higher empathy, higher openness. | ||
| To have Yeah. | ||
| sympathy for those arguments or the arguments that are beneath those arguments | ||
| where people are coming from. | ||
| But the very far left stuff about it, like a day without white people, you know-- | ||
| Evergreen. - Evergreen with brass. | ||
| No, I'm not hearing that stuff anywhere. | ||
| So it gets a little tricky because for me I feel like we can't have it be that all immigration is bad | ||
| or all immigration is good. | ||
| Like you were talking about meeting in the middle with stuff, it's like- Everyone in this country is the descendant of an immigrant, basically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Unless you were Native American or brought here as slaves. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And we also can't make an argument that all immigration is good. | ||
| So maybe if we could put down those bats that we're beating each other with and actually sit down and talk to what the concerns are, it could be a conversation You said something very interesting about when you were on with Ben, or Ben was on with you, I don't remember, you're talking about abortion, and you support choice. | ||
| Yeah, I consider myself begrudgingly pro-choice. | ||
| 20-week cutoff, basically. | ||
| Yeah, but it's like you conceded, which I thought was really interesting, because I'm always trying to look at this issue and to approach an issue that's incredibly emotional with, like, it actually is an issue with very good people on both sides. | ||
| Well, the abortion one's the most interesting to me because it's so obvious that both sides have a principled position to start. | ||
| One doesn't want to control the woman's body. | ||
| One wants to make sure that this child is taken care of and has the right to life and all that. | ||
| So it's like, if we can at least acknowledge that, now we can start discussing some of the science. | ||
| We can start discussing some of the social responsibility of government and everything else. | ||
| What we get into trouble is when we impugn the motives of another side. | ||
| We don't even know our own motives half the time. | ||
| So for me to say, you just said that, let me tell you what your moral failings are. | ||
| Let me tell you where you're not in command of your own moral nature to be flawed to make this argument. | ||
| Anytime we get that from the other sides, the reaction is obviously like a Heisman to that. | ||
| But what you said that I thought was the most courageous thing that you said, and I think it's the tectonic plate under which we can sort of build solutions, is you said, look, I concede that part of my argument is arbitrary. | ||
| How about 20 weeks in a day? | ||
| How about if she's raped and she's gonna die but it's 21 weeks? | ||
| We have to concede that we are not absolute in our views. | ||
| And some things are absolute for people. | ||
| But it's like when we're talking about immigration, when we're talking about gun discipline. | ||
| It's like there's certain stuff where if you go in, same thing, everyone raise your hand who's for gun control. | ||
| Everyone's gonna immediately go into their two camps. | ||
| But you can go in and say, look guys, politicians and the media always wanna make it seem | ||
| like this is an all or nothing proposition. | ||
| That anything that's a slippery slope, we're going to just slide all the way to the bottom, right? | ||
| If we make any impingement on Second Amendment rights, that everyone's going to take our guns away. | ||
| And the other side is like, hey, anything that you come for me for this, if I give any ground, it's going to get worse. | ||
| And everybody's really entrenched in that. | ||
| And it's like, we're already on a slippery slope. | ||
| So what do you think we need to break that? | ||
| Because it seems to me that, I'm with you, we've got these two sides kind of going | ||
| in polar opposite directions. | ||
| You know, I've spent more time talking about one side that I used to be part of, 'cause that's where I was. | ||
| But I get it, we got two sides doing this. | ||
| It's partially a scorn lover thing too. | ||
| You're like, how could you do that? | ||
| Well, that's why I said mugged lefty before. | ||
| I think Brett Weinstein said that I have PTSD, basically. | ||
| But whatever it is, when you're a part of something, you can recognize it there. | ||
| And look, 10 years from now, if I'm hanging out with all these libertarians and they're all crazy, I'll call them out. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I just think it's just human nature. | ||
| You can go to what you know and where you were. | ||
| It's almost like we need something crazy to happen, I don't even know what I mean by this exactly, to break this thing. | ||
| We can talk about it rationally, right? | ||
| And the whole IDW crew can talk about how to have these conversations and agree to disagree, and Ben and the gay cake and all that, I can try to hopefully he'll bake me a cake one day, not that I think he's a particularly good baker, but we can do that for the next 50 years, that discussion. | ||
| But it almost seems to me we're on this, slide to something really horrible is gonna happen. | ||
| Again, I don't know exactly what I mean, but it's like, what would it take to wake people up to this? | ||
| We're all talking about it, and no one's actually stopping it from happening. | ||
| The inevitable dissent. | ||
| I think in a weird way, when everyone's looking at the sort of Trump phenomenon, right, which came out of nowhere, seemingly, but really didn't. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing. | ||
| I think that's part of the vote for him and for, you know, a 70-something-year-old democratic socialist from Vermont, I think was that. | ||
| I think it was a reaction to that, that people said, The status quo isn't gonna work anymore. | ||
| Like I said, I don't care who it is, it's not gonna be another Bush, it's not gonna be another Clinton. | ||
| And I might disagree with the choices that some people made, but I can't disagree with the driving anger and frustration that underlay that. | ||
| And Eric talks about the sort of three big lies that have been put forth. | ||
| One is that all immigration is good. | ||
| Right, the other is that with trade a rising tide lifts all ships. | ||
| The third is that there's zero connection whatsoever between terrorism and Islam, that they're totally unhooked. | ||
| I add a fourth, though Eric thinks it's less relevant, but I think that it's the argument that biology has no basis whatsoever in gender definition or in, you know, sexuality, that there's no correlation. | ||
| That seems like a huge one these days. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, Eric believes that that's less widespread, but I think that culturally, | ||
| that that position is so weaponizing that I think that that's an equivalent one. | ||
| And I think that what you're seeing is a reaction to these absolutes | ||
| that everybody knows at a gut level aren't true. | ||
| And it's like everybody's entertaining them on the surface. | ||
| Everybody's having a conversation which is, you know, I believe only in open borders or I believe we have to shut down borders and separate families. | ||
| And then it's like these polls are so crazy and I think that they're both groups are motivated to protect their further Left or right compatriots. | ||
| I mean, so we're having this movement that's going out in that direction. | ||
| But I think that's what it was a reaction to. | ||
| And I think you're saying, look, where's the point of the Big Bang Theory that the universe, you know, explodes that it starts to come back together again? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I'm afraid it's going to have to take something horrible. | ||
| And again, I don't even know what I mean. | ||
| Like, is there going to be like some terrorist attack or something that will just remind us that these people are not all of our enemies? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's like, I don't want to think of the world that way. | ||
| So you're saying essentially what that thesis is, is to say if there's a horrible terrorist attack, the new sort of out-group threat will get Americans back together. | ||
| Yeah, and there's huge, nobody wants that to happen, of course, and there's huge danger in what that ends up leading to because we know how we sort of went crazy after 9-11 and the Patriot Act and all that. | ||
| But, like, it just seems to me that the wheels on this thing, although now people are talking about it, it's not slowing down. | ||
| And that just leads me to believe it gets to the ledge soon. | ||
| Well, I think the first thing is, you know, like, clean up your own kitchen first. | ||
| I mean, that's what I'm doing. | ||
| There's a guy that I'm on tour with that's doing something about cleaning up your own room. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But see, I switched it to kitchen. | ||
| Kitchen. | ||
| No, that was effective. | ||
| It's yours. | ||
| Jordan got everything he knows. | ||
| Wait, let's pause there for a second. | ||
| Just real quick, because we shouldn't totally dismiss this. | ||
| So you were Jordan's student. | ||
| I was. | ||
| What was that like? | ||
| We'll get back there, but let's just not. | ||
| Because I wanted to do it like 20 minutes ago. | ||
| Jordan was amazing. | ||
| I mean, I love Jordan from minute one. | ||
| You know, he taught me personality psychology. | ||
| I went back and did a young seminar with him, and then he was my thesis advisor. | ||
| This is like, what, mid-90s, early 90s? | ||
| Yeah, I graduated in 95. | ||
| And he was dynamite. | ||
| He was very imposing and formal. | ||
| I just, like, right away was in. | ||
| Like, I just saw the whole thing. | ||
| And I remember telling my college roommates, I was like, that's a guy who's gonna be remembered just by his last name, like 100 years after he's dead. | ||
| And I didn't quite think it was 'cause he was gonna be doing | ||
| Kermit the Frog Hitler memes, but like whatever. | ||
| I mean, I just thought in an academic arena, his sort of brilliance for me was, | ||
| and his pattern recognition and ability to boil stuff down. | ||
| But he would, even then, if somebody came in ideologically from the left or the right, | ||
| and it was kind of a hollow shell, he would just puncture it. | ||
| He was formidable. | ||
| I mean, he wasn't as jokey. | ||
| I mean, obviously, we're good friends now, but he could be intimidating to other people. | ||
| But I always just really liked him. | ||
| And then we stayed in touch after that. | ||
| He was my thesis advisor. | ||
| We were very close. | ||
| And then he officiated my wedding. | ||
| So, I'm the only person on record to have a wedding that, like, cites extensively from Cain and Abel and Kierkegaard. | ||
| I assume the Gulag Archipelago. | ||
| Yeah, we had little, like, Gulag Archipelago, like, table settings. | ||
| No, but at one point, my wife and I just re-watched our wedding video. | ||
| It was so funny, and she's looking And you know, she adores Jordan too. | ||
| And Jordan was going off about something and she's looking up at me and she's in her dress, | ||
| like we're at that moment at the altar, and she said, "This is the part where I wasn't sure | ||
| "if I was getting married or being traded "for a herd of goats." | ||
| Like, so Jordan did a whole archetypal analysis of. | ||
| And then, you know, look, I put his rules for life in Orphan Axe as a, I have like the Assassin's Ten | ||
| Commandments and I wanted actually good rules that someone could be raised by. | ||
| And then I helped him, you know, edit the book and work on the book from an early stage. | ||
| So I read it and had it in Orphan Axe three years before his book came out. | ||
| So when you say that when people would come in with arguments from either side and he could just pop them just like that, that's one of the most interesting things to me because if you listen again to what mainstream is saying about him, it's that he's this ultra conservative or this forced monogamy or he doesn't like gay people or just like any of this nonsense, which every night I hear him go up there and beat these arguments down. | ||
| He beats down the arguments of Identity politics on the right. | ||
| I mean, he's literally, every criticism of him is like the reverse of what he's actually doing. | ||
| Doesn't mean he's right about everything, but it's not, you know, everyone is deserving of criticism, but it should be legit criticism. | ||
| So it must infuriate you when you read some of these things about him, knowing that, you know, this isn't the guy that you learned under. | ||
| Yeah, and meanwhile, he brings like a gay Jew on tour with him to like introduce him. | ||
| He's a crazy Christian homophobe. | ||
| So one of the jokes I have, he got accused of being an anti-Semite at some point, and it was so great. | ||
| Eric and I were talking about this, and I think I tweeted him, like, boy, Jordan did a terrible job covering up his anti-Semitism when he officiated my wedding 15 years ago. | ||
| He's the most incompetent anti-Semite I've ever met. | ||
| You know what's more infuriating for me? | ||
| I feel like the media skew It's so complicated, I've almost given up on it in certain ways. | ||
| Look, I think the media has done amazingly impressive stuff. | ||
| Like, I'm a big fan of the Washington Post, despite how some things have gone. | ||
| So it's like, I'm not giving up on that. | ||
| I believe that the media is doing a really good job. | ||
| On cultural issues, I'm accustomed to it. | ||
| when people come in and attack Jordan for being alt-right, it's like there is a video online | ||
| of him denouncing the alt-right for an hour, if you just bother to look into it. | ||
| The thing that infuriates me more is seemingly intelligent intellectual people | ||
| who will dismiss him or get nervous if I bring his name up based on anything that is wildly taken out of context. | ||
| And with Jordan, it's like, look, I was his student. | ||
| I've known him a lot of years. | ||
| I've seen hundreds and hundreds of hours of his lectures, both in school and here. | ||
| You know, I helped him with his book when he was going through the book, | ||
| and he makes fun of me for that in the acknowledgments. | ||
| There's nothing that he has said that I... | ||
| I mean, I know his work about as well as anyone could. | ||
| There's not a single thing that he said that, if you don't contextualize it, doesn't actually make sense. | ||
| And I have people wholesale say, oh, well, I have my feelings about that. | ||
| It's like, you know, I'll mention doing something with him and people who are seemingly academic, and I'll say, did you read the book? | ||
| No. | ||
| So is that just the plight of doing something that is something close to true? | ||
| I mean, when I'm out there with him every night and he changes the, you know, he does an hour and a half. | ||
| I'm warming the crowd up, he does an hour and a half, then we do like 40 minutes together at the end. | ||
| But that hour and a half he does, he changes it every night. | ||
| I see him searching for truth every night. | ||
| And it's like, well actually, all this hatred and all of that non-contextualized stuff that you're talking about is just, that's just the shitty part of doing, Something good, right? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| If you were writing the character, wouldn't you be dealing with all this? | ||
| It's so interesting. | ||
| Alright, so two things. | ||
| Who's going to say something true and then it's going to be all good? | ||
| Everybody's just going to love him. | ||
| Yeah, like it worked out so well. | ||
| Jesus, it didn't work out that well for him. | ||
| Just what? | ||
| The earth isn't the center of everything. | ||
| So I was thinking... | ||
| That brought up two kind of ideas for me. | ||
| I mean, one of them is people who are seemingly academic and intelligent and pride themselves on being cerebral, it's like, how dare you denigrate him because you read an unflattering profile and not read a book or listen to a lecture or do any research beyond that? | ||
| But they got it in the New York Times. | ||
| I know, well... | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, or in any host of other places that have missed the mark. | ||
| And then the New York Times will come around and do something flattering. | ||
| I mean, a profile's a profile, and they take a point of view. | ||
| But like, dig deeper. | ||
| But what's so interesting is... | ||
| You were just talking about that, and it is such a cool thing to watch him, just, like, you're watching somebody grappling with issues when he's on stage, and you've watched him do that a lot. | ||
| It reminds me a bit of, like, the abstract expressionists. | ||
| I was just thinking, like, where Pollock started to say, the act of creation is a triumph, right? | ||
| So when I'm gonna paint something, you're gonna see my brush stroke, right, that's laid on canvas. | ||
| And of course Lichtenstein did a great kind of piss take on that where he did like a carefully painted cartoon version of that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But where you really are seeing the work and that the work is what is, the abstract expressionists really sort of put the art world on their head by elevating the form and the function for like the heroism of the creator. | ||
| So it's sort of interesting, because I've noted, of course, that he's grappling with things, and part of him thinking about it is what's appealing. | ||
| Like the thing that I said that I keyed to with you is saying, look, part of my argument for pro-choice is arbitrary. | ||
| It has to be. | ||
| We're so used to not conceding any of that. | ||
| So to see somebody stand up in front of 3,000 people and go, hang on, and really be reasoning with that in a way that you might reach in a bag and come up with nothing is compelling, and there's something heroic about that, the way that Jackson Pollock was So as a writer, you want to create characters that show vulnerability because it shows that they're human, and yet we seem to operate in a time when almost no one is showing vulnerability outwardly. | ||
| Our politicians don't want to show it, our media people. | ||
| Everyone wants to be perfect. | ||
| All the virtue signaling these days. | ||
| Everyone wants to be this perfect thing. | ||
| So then you get the few people that show a little vulnerability, and I guess that has a little extra value. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| I mean we tend to see... You didn't even have a question there. | ||
| Just a point. | ||
| Yeah, well I see, it's interesting because we see a lot of faux vulnerability, right? | ||
| Like, when it's mask and virtue signaling. | ||
| Like, I've been thinking about this other notion that I have, which is, you know, in writing, because it's sort of like, why am I doing all this stuff in politics, right? | ||
| Like, nothing makes sense until I look back on it. | ||
| Like, when I was like, why would I study, you know, Shakespearean tragedy, Jung and Freud? | ||
| And it's like, oh, that's thrillers, right? | ||
| That's everything that I love. | ||
| But likewise with politics, it's like, when you're writing well, what you want to avoid is cliche. | ||
| Like, it's like your podcast. | ||
| Like, what you don't want to do is do, like, what you're supposed to say. | ||
| Everything about you and what you do is not saying what everyone else says and not lowering yourself to cliché. | ||
| So, in books, that's what you search for, right? | ||
| If there's an obvious plot turn, right? | ||
| You have the cop sitting outside the guy being like, this is my last day until retirement and I'm going to buy a yacht and sail around the world. | ||
| You're like, that guy's getting killed. | ||
| Like everything we try and do is avoid that. | ||
| So in politics, so much of what I'm doing is trying to make people speak humanly | ||
| and to avoid buzzwords. | ||
| And so it's like I have this theory that as soon as you talk about a woman's right to choose, | ||
| that doesn't feel like it's sufficiently complex and motivated. | ||
| I understand people need to, we need to gravitate with shorthand. | ||
| But I remember growing up in the Reagan era, family of like, we were the only Jews | ||
| in Saratoga and Silicon Valley in my neighborhood at the time. | ||
| And the only people who voted Democrat. | ||
| It was early days. | ||
| Silicon Valley's so diverse now, but that was all the Hewlett-Packard engineers who looked like the launch guys from NASA with the glasses and the pocket protectors. | ||
| It was totally geared that way. | ||
| Peter Thiel's not thrilled with the diversity in Silicon Valley, but that's a different diversity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is he not? | |
| Okay. | ||
| Well, he's not thrilled with the diversity of thought, but you were talking about the diversity of skin color. | ||
| Of thought, right. | ||
| Where was I? | ||
| I lost my thread. | ||
| You guys were the outliers when you were growing up there. | ||
| Oh, right, and so everybody was talking about family values. | ||
| That was a big political thing from the right. | ||
| And I'm sure you had a bit of a reaction to that, too, of like, well, I wanna talk about family values. | ||
| And I just felt like, what do you mean? | ||
| It's such a Republican word that coded for all this stuff for me, and I was naturally very resistant to it. | ||
| So then I grew up, I get married, I have two kids, and I'm like, hey, wait a minute, I should have family values. | ||
| Family values, it's like this new light because the word was co-opted as a catchphrase. | ||
| And when Republicans were using it, At one time, it had a rich embodiment of meaning, but when it's used again and again and again and again in a campaign, it loses all the life to it. | ||
| And the same thing happens with liberal slogans. | ||
| And so it's almost like the process of compressing information into newsworthy soundbites and using phrases and catchphrases, the further you are from genuine or authentic thought, It's a very similar thing of where you're trying to reach in and do things differently in novels or in screenwriting or comics. | ||
| It's a very similar thing to the stages. | ||
| Don't just shovel out a bunch of cliches like, oh, Democrats are all for redistribution of wealth. | ||
| It's like, no, that's not what all Democrats are for. | ||
| Republicans are all racist and scared of outsiders. | ||
| It's like, no, that's not what all Republicans are. | ||
| And so the more that we hear things that we've heard again and again and again, the further we're off the mark. | ||
| And maybe that's why this expansive format is what's leading to more complicated things | ||
| 'cause we don't have two minutes to just sort of hurl the cliches at each other. | ||
| Yeah, so if we're looking forward a little bit to the elections that are about to happen these midterms, | ||
| now it seems to me that for the decent Democrats trying to retain some of what old liberalism | ||
| and old democratic messaging was, there's a really tough position here | ||
| because it seems to me that if the Democrats win, it means that the further left wing of the party wins right | ||
| now. | ||
| Is that a fair estimation? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think that's right. | ||
| Because you think that these sort of unknown people Yeah, by unknown people, I mean, so it's like, tell me the candidates who you know to be hardcore left. | ||
| Well, here, the reason I'm asking you is that if the argument is that these far lefties are gonna win, well then, there's no reason to have a reformation of the Democratic Party. | ||
| They're gonna go, all right, Greg, see ya, you know, our far lefties won. | ||
| If the Republicans win, and then that sort of, Far left thing implodes, then there's a huge amount of space for you. | ||
| But if what you're saying is there is this huge groundswell of people that nobody's heard of who are more moderate, sort of blue dog, they're rejecting some of this socialism stuff, that's a hopeful story there that I haven't heard too much of. | ||
| Yeah, well I'm more sanguine about this, because I feel like, just like we talked about people dismissing Jordan because they read a New York Times profile, or like whatever the hit piece is of the guy who talked about him romancing the savage, like there's horrible stuff that's out there, but they haven't actually read his book, or they haven't seen an actual lecture, or they haven't read an opposing piece. | ||
| Even if you only want to read profiles, it's like maybe read a flattering one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you hold yourself to be an intellectual before dismissing him as a pseudoscientist, which is absolutely absurd given his academic record. | ||
| Like, maybe take a bigger position. | ||
| Same thing is happening in some ways with politics. | ||
| and I don't ever wanna put people on the spot, but it's like, I always feel like, | ||
| name a bunch of congressional candidates, and people are like, "Um, Ocasio and Ocasio." | ||
| It's like, people, that's not what we're reading, that's not the water we're swimming in. | ||
| And so to really have a conversation, we have to go outside of the profiles about | ||
| you being an alt-righter and Jordan being whatever Jordan is this week. | ||
| It's amazing the things he's been. | ||
| It's incredible, they get. | ||
| And we need to go out and dig into that, and that's a thing where I can say I've spent, | ||
| you know, at this point, hundreds of hours with the party and finding, | ||
| and I don't know all this stuff, like I'm not a natural politician, | ||
| but I'm going to talk to people to go, here's what I think we need to sort of | ||
| unify the party, you know, under the values that I think that we've had in the past | ||
| and need to improve on in the future, especially with anti-corruption. | ||
| And here's the way that we need to talk about issues that concede that the other side is human and that we don't have a magical ball to judge them and to judge all of their moral shortcomings. | ||
| And what I'm finding again and again and again and again is that these candidates are amazing, but there's sort of no reason unless you really go digging that you would have heard of them, because no one's doing that. | ||
| And that's part of why I called you to enlist you in my evil project. | ||
| And I was like, look, you and I agree on almost everything. | ||
| Let me get some people on here to talk to you so that you can see that that's in fact like 90% of the party. | ||
| Well, that's the thing. | ||
| I don't care how this story ends as long as I remain true to myself. | ||
| So if you succeed, right, and the messaging of this succeeds, and five years from now I'm proud to be a Democrat again, if that even matters in the labeling process, or wherever else I am, as long as I'm true to myself, that's what I care about. | ||
| But it's like, man, get to it and make this thing work and that would be great. | ||
| Well, and I should also make abundantly clear, like, I don't mean in any way to imply that I'm somehow like the magical steering... No, no, I got you. | ||
| I mean, you... Yeah, but I mean, that's what I'm trying to do. | ||
| So I'm doing my part of that. | ||
| But obviously, there's a lot of political leadership. | ||
| There's a lot of people working on it. | ||
| My team is, you know, includes Marshall Herskovits and Callie Corey. | ||
| Like, we have a lot of people who are engaged in this. | ||
| So, but I mean, your point holds. | ||
| I just realized I don't want to sit here and pretend like I'm the unique messenger of the party. | ||
| I've been putting in a lot of time, and I think I see things in a way ... I have a pretty broad range of friends and associates, and I think I can really see things well from different perspectives. | ||
| If there is another talent that I would claim besides typing, it might be that. | ||
| That I'm glad and empowered to have conversations with people like you, where you have concerns that are different than mine. | ||
| And a real genuine curiosity to kind of go, poke holes in this. | ||
| Here's what I'm thinking. | ||
| Tell me everything that's dumb, because that'll give me a big benefit when I have to go sell it internally, and certainly when we go out in the real world, because then you're naked. | ||
| So if I can't enlist people who think differently and see the world differently to really beat up ideas that I might have, it's like that's just silly. | ||
| That's like wandering out into the mob naked, you know? | ||
| So that's just something that's always intrigued me. | ||
| Yeah, that's a pretty solid endpoint. | ||
| I think. | ||
| Unless you got something better than that, but we kind of wrapped it nicely there. | ||
| Yeah, but before I deteriorate into inarticulateness, maybe we'll just call it a day. | ||
| All right, we're going to do more on comic books next time, I think. | ||
| We should do all comic books. | ||
| We should just totally geek out. | ||
| And you'll have like three viewers. | ||
| Like your podcast will get super, yeah, well, maybe you'll get a whole bunch of other Yeah, you just shift audiences a little bit. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Just all the people who we associate with are not going to be interested. | ||
| Ah, that's all right. | ||
| It's been a pleasure, man. | ||
| For more on Greg, follow him on the Twitter. |
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