Dec. 26, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
31:16
Participants
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| Alright people, this is the Big Bananas Bonkers Rubin Report end of the year clip show recapping some of my favorite moments of 2018. | ||
| Before we hit the clips though, I want to take a quick moment to thank all of you guys who listen, watch, share and support the show. | ||
| You guys are the engine that have kept us totally independent for over two years now, and trust me, we're just getting started. | ||
| 2018 was by far our biggest year yet as the intellectual dark web went mainstream. | ||
| I toured over 80 cities all over the world with Jordan Peterson. | ||
| I also returned to stand-up comedy. | ||
| Check the link down below for upcoming dates. | ||
| And we continue to have the conversations that I believe can restore some sanity to the universe. | ||
| I've actually never felt better about the direction we're headed, and with your help, we'll continue to grow. | ||
| So here's my one sentence sell job. | ||
| Help us remain totally independent and fan funded by going to DaveRubin.com slash donate. | ||
| Alright, that's it. | ||
| Now more importantly, thank you and enjoy some of my favorite moments with some of my | ||
| favorite people from 2018. | ||
| And if you haven't, you should go watch it. | ||
| But in effect, basically she tried to make an argument that you have heard a gajillion times before, but why does your right to free speech supersede a trans person's right to feel okay with themselves or something? | ||
| Even the way she phrased the question was a little confused and conflated. | ||
| But the reaction to it, your answer was great, but it was the reaction, the regular people watching at home that were going, this is nonsense. | ||
| This is just abject nonsense. | ||
| The thing that made it viral was the fact that she recognized in the moment that what she was saying was nonsense. | ||
| It was the moment where you could see the light go on briefly and she just went, wait, what did I just say? | ||
| And there was no escape. | ||
| It was pretty grand. | ||
| Yeah, well, the funny thing about her argument is that it was predicated on the idea that somehow people have a right to be comfortable. | ||
| That's just not a right you have in life. | ||
| Of all the things you can say that you don't have a right to in life, being comfortable is number one. | ||
| Which you made that point to me. | ||
| You can offend me right now. | ||
| So the thing is, if your right to be comfortable trumps my right to talk, then I don't get to talk. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| Because I'm going to say things, if I'm actually talking, I'm going to say things, if they're profound things, if they're contentious things, or truthful things, I'm going to say things that, if they don't disturb you, are going to disturb you, and if they don't disturb you, there's someone that's going to be disturbed about them. | ||
| So, what's the answer to that? | ||
| Everyone can be comfortable in the silence. | ||
| But that also doesn't work because then we can't exchange ideas. | ||
| We're not comfortable in the silence. | ||
| We're isolated and dead in the silence. | ||
| So it's a completely incoherent perspective. | ||
| I will say, the last time I was on your program, the only time I was on before, I remember you asking me what I thought of the left and I... | ||
| Quipped what left, I haven't seen them in who knows how long. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That turns out not to have been right. | ||
| They exist. | ||
| I mean, yes, I hadn't seen them. | ||
| But one of the funny things about my trajectory is that having been, you know, the experience was very much like being ejected from the left. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And I got ejected from the left and a lot of people on the right embraced me, which was weird. | ||
| And then even weirder was the discovery of all the other people who had been ejected from the left. | ||
| And so the point is, this is sort of a cryptic You're talking to the big guy. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| And so the point is the discovery that there are a lot of people who you might, if you | ||
| just looked them up online, you would come to the wrong conclusion about where their | ||
| sympathies lay, that that's interesting. | ||
| And I think the conversation between those of us who have been catapulted out and those | ||
| of us who have landed on the right is going to involve the recognition that in fact we | ||
| are all suffering from a kind of political PTSD, and that in fact many people who are | ||
| on the right are there because they've been traumatized by really low-quality, dangerous | ||
| leftist thinking, but that does not make their right-of-center position natural. | ||
| I'm not saying there are no natural positions over there but many people who are there are there Because they have run from things that they have heard on the left. | ||
| And once we give up on the idea that anybody on the map today has the answer with respect to the policies that we are supposed to embrace. | ||
| Once we say, actually, everybody's policies are a failure. | ||
| If we were to enact the libertarian program, it would fail for game-theoretic reasons. | ||
| If we were to enact the socialist program, it would fail for game-theoretic reasons. | ||
| Capitalism is the same thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the point is, okay, fresh sheet of paper with respect to policy, Now there's a lot for us to talk about, starting from values. | ||
| And there are a lot of people who, if you ask them to list their values apart from policy, would fall out on the left. | ||
| Wow, is it an interesting moment that that conversation may be about to get started and to be in a position to actually influence it, I must say, is pretty exciting. | ||
| One of the things that I found out that was sort of amazing about your history, you briefly mentioned it right before we started, you were a Marxist at one time in your life. | ||
| Most people will find this hard to believe, but it is true. | ||
| But it's not that unusual. | ||
| Most of the leading conservative thinkers of our time did not start off as conservatives. | ||
| You had a couple like Bill Buckley and George Will. | ||
| Milton Friedman was a liberal and a Keynesian. | ||
| Hayek was a socialist. | ||
| Ronald Reagan was so far left, at one point the FBI was following him, you know? | ||
| So, there's a huge movement from the left to the right as people get older. | ||
| Yeah, I'm well aware, as I mentioned to you earlier, as a former progressive, I understand that movement in the modern sense. | ||
| Do you remember sort of what you were thinking, what appealed to you at that time about Marxism? | ||
| Yes, I mean, there was no alternative being discussed. | ||
| My first job was as a Western Union messenger, and I would come home on some nights, I would take the Fifth Avenue bus, which cost all of 15 cents in those days, but I figured I'd splurge now and then. | ||
| And I would drive, it would go all the way up Fifth Avenue past all these Lord & Taylor and all these fancy places. | ||
| And then I would cross 57th Street past Carnegie Hall and down Riverside Drive and that was sort of the Gold Coast area. | ||
| And then as I came across this long viaduct, And it turned into 135th Street. | ||
| Suddenly, there were the tenements. | ||
| And I wondered, why is this? | ||
| I mean, it's so different. | ||
| And nothing in the schools, or most of the books, seem to deal with that. | ||
| And Marx dealt with that. | ||
| So, it's like winning an election when there's only one person running. | ||
| So then what was your wake-up to what was wrong with that line of thinking? | ||
| Facts. | ||
| I'm not one of those who thinks things are worse now than they've ever been. | ||
| I mean, this is a country where we've fought over big issues for a long time. | ||
| The Revolutionary War, of course, and then of course we had the War of 1812, we had the Civil War. | ||
| World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Korean War, 9-11, people hated Ronald Reagan, they thought he was a warmonger, George Bush, what was it, Bush lied, people died. | ||
| There's tension in this country, there always has been, for a very long period of time. | ||
| We get along better now than ever before. | ||
| I don't think you can understate the fact that we elected and re-elected a black president in the 50s. | ||
| The polls show that the percentage of white Americans who would be willing to vote for a black person, no matter how well qualified, was in the single digits. | ||
| And now, I think only three or four percent of Republicans and Democrats say that under no circumstances would they vote for a black person for president. | ||
| In fact, there's greater prejudice against a Mormon and against voting for a woman than it is voting for a black person now. | ||
| So... | ||
| America is a very different place than it used to be. | ||
| And for the left to act like it's not insults the men and women who worked hard to get us to where we are right now. | ||
| It's actually true to say that Obama was basically as honest as a politician can be and still be a politician. | ||
| I'm sure he lied about things, right? | ||
| But there's no story on Obama being just this depraved person behind closed doors. | ||
| Who's a con artist who gets away with everything that he can get away with, who's trailing a long list of business and interpersonal casualties, who will tell you, if you put them on camera or you get them privately, that he's the worst person they've ever met. | ||
| That's who's president now. | ||
| It's a completely different personality. | ||
| So whatever happens, let's say we're living in a universe where Having a uniquely narcissistic, selfish, shallow personality in this position of power works out well. | ||
| Let's just say that. | ||
| So let's just take your wrecking ball theory. | ||
| He's kind of swung through here. | ||
| He's disrupted everything. | ||
| You know, I do view him, as I've said before, as a kind of evil Chauncey Gardner character. | ||
| I don't view him as this sort of masochist. | ||
| I think Scott Adams is completely out to lunch on this. | ||
| I don't think he's this genius manipulator. | ||
| I mean, he's got some talents, obviously. | ||
| But you think it's much less calculated? | ||
| Much less calculated, yeah. | ||
| I don't think him contradicting himself two sentences later Right? | ||
| When he says, you know, this is an amazing letter, you'd all like to read this letter, and then he says two sentences later, I haven't read the letter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's not calculated. | ||
| He's just not, doesn't have the cog, he can't take the cognitive overhead to even figure out what, you know, what was logically implied by the last thing he said, right? | ||
| So he's not, the truth is, he's not, he lies all the time, but worse than lying, and this is the great distinction that the philosopher Harry Frankfurt made in his book on bullshit, Worst than lying is that he's bullshitting all the time. | ||
| And the difference between lying and bullshitting is that if I'm going to lie to you, I'm paying attention to what I know is true, I know you know what is true, and I'm trying to insert a lie into the space provided. | ||
| In a way that you won't notice, right? | ||
| I'm having to keep track of reality in order to lie to you successfully. | ||
| I understand your logical expectations. | ||
| I understand that if I tell you that, you know, I was an hour late here because the traffic was so bad, I can't say in the next sentence, oh, I left an hour late from my house, right? | ||
| So, the bullshitter isn't doing any of that. | ||
| The bullshitter is just talking, right, and therefore has renounced the reality testing he has to do to lie successfully, and he's just... the burden is not on him to make any sense at all, in the end, and that, to an amazing degree, not entirely, I think he does actually lie strategically sometimes, but to an amazing degree, And this is what I think is so harmful about his presidency, whatever happens with North Korea or anything else that we might, you know, care about. | ||
| To an amazing degree, he has revealed that half of our society will accept somebody who is just bullshitting all the time about things great and small. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't matter how important or how inconsequential. | ||
| Porn stars, you know, what just happened with the G7, you know, what was said behind closed doors, what he's going to say to some maniac with nukes. | ||
| We've completely forsaken any expectation of a reality-based conversation and many people seem to revel in it. | ||
| Many people seem to think this is just good fun. | ||
| It's a bit of the wrecking ball theory gone to some nihilistic extreme where it's just Let's just, you know, let's just burn it all out. | ||
| Having gone through the looking glass, having gone through the direct, you know, to borrow a phrase from the far left, but the lived experience of actually being at the center of a mob, at the center of riots, and then watching as the world, the mainstream media and others, tried to do a public relations spin on it and tell a totally different story. | ||
| To live that, and to watch the institution that you loved become totally disloyal to you, and to watch many people whom you respected hide, you can't unsee that. | ||
| It's valuable. | ||
| And the fact that we're sitting here talking together, and that many of us in the Intellectual Dark Web and in this bigger group are speaking and saying, actually, the culture of fear that is society-wide is real. | ||
| And so I'll say, the first time I met my students after the November 2016 election, after Trump was elected, Evergreen is a very left place. | ||
| Olympia is a very left place. | ||
| Pretty much everyone on campus had that glazed-eyed, slack-jawed look that people in most progressive enclaves will be familiar with from that time, from those few days, right? | ||
| Myself included. | ||
| Even though, you know, I was no Hillary fan, but I didn't see that outcome coming, and I certainly didn't vote for Trump. | ||
| We got to class and my co-faculty, whom I admire greatly, just proceeded with her lecture on horse evolution. | ||
| And I'm looking around the classroom going, no one here cares about horse evolution. | ||
| Today is not the day. | ||
| Today is not the day. | ||
| So she ended a bit early and we had lab a couple hours later. | ||
| And before she let them go, I said, hold on, if anyone wants to stay, this is no longer class, but if anyone wants to stay, I would be happy to lead a conversation about what just happened to our country. | ||
| And about 40 of our 50 students stayed and skipped their lunch hour. | ||
| We went right to anatomy lab that afternoon from this conversation. | ||
| And what I said to them was, do not for a minute believe that racists and sexists elected Trump. | ||
| Think about how many times you have had to censor yourself on this campus when you had an opinion that was even slightly different from the accepted dogma. | ||
| And that conversation not only brought life to the room, but afterwards I had several students come up to me, some of them in tears, telling me stories about one of them had lost a job on campus for speaking an opinion that was not accepted. | ||
| One of them had another story of another friend who lost a job. | ||
| others talked about their self-censorship. | ||
| And all of these people, again, were far left. | ||
| Not that it should matter, but these weren't even people who were conservatives or who held conservative views. | ||
| So that is the larger culture of fear that is hardly restricted to Evergreen, | ||
| but is society-wide, that we are speaking about and that people are responding to, | ||
| because at Google, at Starbucks, in cubicles, in campuses, but far beyond campuses across the country. | ||
| And across the weird countries, at least. | ||
| This is a problem. | ||
| Shapiro, will you bake Rubin a wedding cake? | ||
| Okay, so, I mean, my answer is... Well, I'm married already. | ||
| He's married already. | ||
| It was my anniversary last week. | ||
| An anniversary cake would have been nice. | ||
| Right, so the answer is no. | ||
| And the reason I won't is because as a religious Jew, I do not participate in activities that I believe are sinful. | ||
| But again, we live in a free country, and Dave knows this. | ||
| He doesn't have to care what I think about sin. | ||
| And as long as I'm not bothering Dave, I don't see why it's a problem. | ||
|
unidentified
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So, will I... | |
| Does Dave have a husband? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are we friends? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And are we going to go out to dinner sometime in the near future? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But there's a difference between me just being friends with Dave and me actively participating in an event that I feel is religiously sinful. | ||
| And I think that's how most religious Christians and most religious Jews feel, and while that's awkward, we're still friends in spite of it, which is why we're friends. | ||
| If we couldn't be friends in spite of it, then it would be a bad thing. | ||
| Well, look, when I did your interview show, which by the way, I mean, yeah, you jacked the idea of an interview show from me, it's all right, but nobody had done it before me. | ||
| But you said that to me, and I truly mean this, if you think what I'm doing is sinful, It sounds glib, but I don't care. | ||
| And my view is you don't have to care, right? | ||
| It's a free country. | ||
| Right, like that's the thing. | ||
| And it's like, look, look, there is, of course, someone's gonna go, well, wait a minute, if you really think his marriage is sinful or something, of course, there may be a place that in the nature of our friendship, maybe that we can't quite get to that I would be able to get to with someone that didn't think - For sure. | ||
| That is very possible, and it goes both ways, right? | ||
| Like, I then look at you and I go, well, why? | ||
| Right, you adopt a kid, you don't want me teaching your kid about the nature of family, perhaps, | ||
| right? | ||
| I mean, like, there's certain areas-- | ||
| Possibly, but you're probably a pretty good dad, like, you know what I mean? | ||
| But why is it that we're able to do this, and most people can't do this? | ||
| That's what I'm curious about. | ||
| Because we go home at night and we can have our own lives. | ||
| And I think part of friendship, by the way, is that. | ||
| We go home at night and we just have our own lives. | ||
| I'm not married to you, right? | ||
| My wife and I have to agree on these issues. | ||
| You and I don't have to agree on these issues in order for us to share a common space together, and that's really the important thing to me. | ||
| Do you think your wife and you have to agree on all of these issues, or just the sort of The more foundational ones. | ||
| The foundational ones, but I do think that, you know, how you raise your kids religiously and with regard to things like sexual morality does actually have to be at the root of how you teach your kids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if you have deep divisions with your spouse on these issues, I think that, and you're looking to build a family anyway, then I think that these are issues where building on a bad foundation is a bad move. | ||
| Okay, so if you wouldn't bake me a cake, that's okay, and now, because it's 50-50, I can't bake you a cake, which David's an incredible chef, and he would have done it kosher the whole thing, man. | ||
| Wow, now I feel bad. | ||
| He would have done it for you. | ||
| You got me this close. | ||
| Putting that aside, you can't have David's kosher cake now. | ||
| If we were having an anniversary party, would you come? | ||
| If I was inviting all the crew that we all know, and we were just an anniversary party, we're just having a party, and I'll even throw in some kosher food for you, to make sure you don't have to bring your own food. | ||
| You know, honestly, I'd have to think about it. | ||
| I'd have to think about it. | ||
| So that's interesting to me, because that's a different thing. | ||
| Well, not really, because again, if you're a religious person, and again, take it from the religious perspective, from the religious perspective, the question is, are you glorifying something that you think is sinful? | ||
| So if there's a party for something that you think was originally sinful, can you participate in that? | ||
| So from a religious point of view, that's an actual serious moral question. | ||
| What I got to dinner with you the answer is yes right because that's not actually like let's celebrate Something that I feel that you're doing is sinful, but I'd have to I'd have to think about that one I'm and I'm being a perfectly honest straightforward as possible I want you to so it's see that's so interesting to me because it's like if I threw a regular Party just we're just having a party at my house and all the guys Like I bake you a cake that had nothing to do with a gay wedding Right and I would go to a party with you that has nothing to do with gay marriage Would you bake me a regular cake? | ||
| Could I just have a third cake? | ||
| Yeah, sure, I'll give you a cake. | ||
| Well, hold on, I mean, my baking sucks, I'll just buy you one. | ||
| I want a shittily baked Shapiro cake, and then once I get it here, I can do whatever I want with it. | ||
| I mean, it's not gonna be good, but it'll be there. | ||
| I do think Silicon Valley at this point has a bit of a conformity problem. | ||
| It has, you know, a bit of a way in which people are, you know, too much all thinking the same way. | ||
| It's just like there was, you know, the Apple I saw this meme on the internet the other day where it was sort of the Silicon Valley 1997, colon, think different, and the Silicon Valley 2018, colon, think the same. | ||
| It's like, you know, when you ask a question, you know, why is it so left-wing? | ||
| I think these things are, you know, they're somewhat over-determined. | ||
| So I would say part of it is that it's probably the most educated part of the country in terms of how much time people spend in college. | ||
| And I think one of the downsides of too much education is that you get the most brainwashed. And so it's the most educated can | ||
| also mean that it is the most brainwashed. | ||
| This is perhaps not so true of the founders, but certainly of many of the rank and file people, | ||
| who are, if you're sort of like a really good engineer, or really good at some specific thing, | ||
| your education typically does not involve you thinking that much about politics. | ||
| And so it's not necessarily from deep ideological conviction. | ||
| It's often more as a fashion statement than as a question of power. | ||
| And so one of the things that's always a little bit hard to score is that even if you took a survey in Silicon Valley, it comes out as quite far to the left, You know, weirdly uniform, weird sort of group think. | ||
| It's super hard to know whether people really believe this, whether they're just going along. | ||
| So I think it's pretty liberal, but of course not as liberal as it looks. | ||
| And that's in a way worse, because it means people are too scared to articulate things. | ||
| I think diversity is a good thing, especially diversity of ideas is to be valued, but you don't have real diversity when you just have a group of people who look different and think alike. | ||
| It has to be more than just having the extras from the Space Cantina scene. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's not about diversity at all. | ||
| It's about conformity. | ||
| But the point is, we're going to have to live with each other as a nation. | ||
| And we're gonna have to love each other. | ||
| And there are a lot of people with this memetic complex in their mind. | ||
| This is why I went and I talked to Kanye. | ||
| I thought what Kanye was gonna 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's 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. | ||
| Well, there is a fear that if you acknowledge that there are differences between individuals or groups, That you're saying that one group is inferior. | ||
| So there's been a... the idea that we have to be the same to be equal has been a very prevalent and strong idea. | ||
| I don't know who came... where the idea comes from, but it's dangerous because if you... | ||
| If you argue that no true equality can be achieved unless we're all the same, then we can't have equality. | ||
| However, if you argue that no, we are all morally equal and that we deserve equal opportunity and the equal We deserve equal opportunities to live a happy, flourishing life. | ||
| However, there are differences between us. | ||
| Then you can preserve that ethical principle. | ||
| So, it's very problematic for people who think that there can be no equality between men and women unless we're proven to be the same, identical, because the evidence doesn't support the idea that we're the same. | ||
| But look, I've had so many years doing this, Dave, and I can't explain how I still love it. | ||
| I love the interplay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You should love what you do. | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| Know why? | ||
| You learn something every day. | ||
| Every day. | ||
| So I can't be closed-minded. | ||
| Like, I'm a liberal politically, certainly in social issues. | ||
| But I'm not close-minded enough to think that you can't have an opposing view. | ||
| I like the argument. | ||
| I like the discussion. | ||
| But in interviewing, I never—I leave my ego at the door. | ||
| I try not to use the word I. It's irrelevant. | ||
| And I try to get into— Edward Bennett Williams, the great lawyer, told me once, I said, what is the role of the criminal defense lawyer? | ||
| He said to get one person on the jury to walk in your client's shoes. | ||
| If you can get one person to walk in your client's shoes, you've got a hung jury. | ||
| All he has to do is say, I would have done that. | ||
| I've been in spaces at Columbia, for example, or conversations where my being black, it was obvious to me that there was an assumption of moral worthiness or of a kind of heightened moral knowledge that I would have as a black person that a white person wouldn't have. | ||
| And I think I think, I'm not the first to make this analogy of course, but the religious analogy and the analogy to original sin is pretty apt. | ||
| Because it, I mean, the way, this has a lot to do with black history also, because the way I see it, there are kind of two ways to study history. | ||
| There's the conventional way, which is, you know, you study World War I, you study the causes and consequences, read different takes on the significance, and once you've studied all you need to know, you move on to the next topic. | ||
| But then there's a religious way of studying history, Which is, it's not enough to know the facts. | ||
| We have to go somewhere on Sunday, every single week, and learn, talk about the same stories over and over again. | ||
| So this is, it's the difference between how an atheist learns about the life of Jesus, and how a Christian learns about the life of Jesus, and re-learns it every week for the rest of their life. | ||
| In my view, how we're looking at the history of race relations in this country, the history of racism, We are more and more putting it in the religious category of history, where I can read a piece about the history of lynching in the New York Times almost once every two or three months. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Lynching is a decades-old crime at this point, and obviously it was a heinous stain on this country's legacy. | ||
| Yeah, but the number of deaths that is the highest amount quoted in the New York Times with regard to how many black people were lynched in this country is around 4,000, right? | ||
| Every single year, twice that many black people die of homicide. | ||
| And you just don't even hear about that in the New York Times. | ||
| There are 20,000 engineers, engineers making between $200,000 and $400,000 working right now just on Google Search, just on that one feature of Google. 20,000! | ||
| This is the most technologically advanced and powerful organization in the history of the world. | ||
| Its technology and capabilities so far outstrip those of the Pentagon, for example, or the Chinese military, or the Russian, the Russians, or any other group. | ||
| This is the most powerful technological entity in the world which has a chokehold on all human information in English. | ||
| So that is all sort of all you need to know. | ||
| I don't care if Jesus is in charge of the country. | ||
| That's too much power for any entity to have. | ||
| And it's a it's a threat to the nation state, actually. | ||
| It's a threat to all of us. | ||
| So, yeah, I think whatever it takes. | ||
| is what we need to do, like now. | ||
| I'm an Enlightenment guy, but the thing is, is that when I look backwards in time, | ||
| you know, what people like Harris and Pinker attribute to the Enlightenment, | ||
| I see as the Enlightenment being the latest flowering of a process that was | ||
| indescribably older than that. | ||
| This is exactly right. |
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