Sept. 29, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| We have a bravery deficit in the country right now, and we have a group of people that are more than happy to take advantage of that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Alright, you guys know this guy, Dave Rubin? | |
| All right, so here's the deal. | ||
| Dave did our Philadelphia event and tore the house down, and so we were chatting afterwards, and he wanted to come back, and he wanted to do something for his show, The Rubin Report, which has taken off. | ||
| And I said to him, I said, you know, look, we'd love to do it. | ||
| We'd love to get you talking about, you know, what we're doing. | ||
| But I kind of had this epiphany, and I asked him backstage, and he's He's agreed, which is awesome. | ||
| The Dave is going through this transformation of coming to the principles of liberty. | ||
| And so I would like to interview Dave and really dig in on how he got there. | ||
| And you've told me backstage, but I want to just get your permission. | ||
| You're okay for me to kind of dig in and talk about this transformation and talk about what got you from where you were to being here. | ||
| And I think we can, we can talk not just about that, but about, you know what you're seeing what you're projecting out for | ||
| the future yeah well before we do anything else so we are airing this | ||
| uh... not live right now but this will be aired on my channel so | ||
| can you crazy libertarians make some noise (applause) | ||
| you know the thing is if you go to a progressive conference and you ask them to make some noise | ||
| there's like one guy like can you | ||
| can someone else clap for me Is that possible? | ||
| That one took a second for you. | ||
| Let's roll. | ||
| All right, so I want to go back. | ||
| You know, you talk a lot about kind of your experience, whether it's with the Young Turks or maybe in the comedian scene, but do you think there was one moment where you realized... I don't want to say that you were wrong, but you realized... No, no, I was wrong. | ||
| Okay, great. | ||
| You realize, you know, maybe I'm not seeing this correctly or maybe there was something that sparked you to kind of dig a little deeper. | ||
| What was that? | ||
| Was it a moment you can point to? | ||
| Was it a book? | ||
| Was it a, you know, somebody that was an influencer in your life? | ||
| Yeah, you know, there were a couple things that happened over the course of a couple years that started waking me up to some of this. | ||
| Bridget Phetasy, who some of you guys may know, she's come up with a phrase that I really like related to this, that most of us, if you grow up in a Western education system, you sort of, you have factory settings that just start you off, like when you buy a computer with factory settings or a television with factory settings, and those factory settings, because it's being handed down from the education establishment, the political establishment, the media establishment, they're all sort of through the leftist prism, you know? | ||
| we should give to these people and take from these people. | ||
| There's a certain set of ideas that we're all sort of supposed to accept. | ||
| And I kind of accepted those ideas. | ||
| And, you know, I've always considered myself a liberal, and I know we're going to talk | ||
| about classical liberalism, obviously. | ||
| But I saw progressives as kind of louder, angrier, edgier liberals, and that kind of | ||
| There was a sort of over-the-top nature to it, but it did kind of appeal to me. | ||
| But after a year or two of really being in on it, and this is when I was at the Young Turks, there were a bunch of things that started becoming really obvious, and I think I'm sure many of you guys have gone through this. | ||
| Once you start seeing it, you can't unsee it, right? | ||
| I mean, that's why the phrase, the red pill, really resonates with people. | ||
| Because, for example, one of the things I really started noticing, just sort of at a broad level, was that everyone that progressives disagreed with somehow was a racist, or a bigot, or a homophobe, or a transphobe, or an Islamophobe, or we could go on and on. | ||
| And I thought, this just can't be right. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Maybe we're right. | ||
| Maybe us progressives are right about things, but it can't possibly be that every single person who disagrees with us is somehow the worst of the worst. | ||
| And there were many instances that I started really seeing that. | ||
| The one that really cracked it for me, which I'm sure many of you have seen this, this is about five or six years ago, Sam Harris was on Real Time with Bill Maher. | ||
| And Bill Maher, of course, is really the standard bearer for the left, for liberals in the United States. | ||
| And he had Ben Affleck on. | ||
| And he was talking to Sam. | ||
| And Sam's a neuroscientist and a well-known atheist. | ||
| They started talking about the difference between Islam as a set of ideas and Muslims as people. | ||
| You would never want to be bigoted towards people, but you should be allowed to criticize any set of ideas, | ||
| whether it's a religious set of ideas or a political set of ideas or anything else. | ||
| And Affleck, who probably was on steroids preparing for Batman, basically told Bill Maher and Sam | ||
| Harris that they were gross and racist. | ||
| And the over-the-top nature of it, it somehow became very obvious to me how poorly the left was dealing with difficult, I mean, it's really difficult stuff to talk about why you should be able to criticize religion without being bigoted towards people. | ||
| That's tough, right? | ||
| And that was just one of many things, but that was the one that I started, it was the most obvious example of something that I had seen, there was a seed that had started to take root. | ||
| And you talk about kind of the identity politics that we see from the left. | ||
| I mean, a lot of the folks in this room, you know, the students, when we're working on campus, you know, if we present a message of anything that is not exactly in line with kind of these big government solutions, we do get labeled. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And we get kind of grouped into these, you know, whatever it is, like you said. | ||
| I mean, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, and it's, I think because we're not conforming. | ||
| Do you think that the left Do you think that they lost their mind at a certain point, or do you think it's just that certain people are louder and that has become the tactic? | ||
| I think there's a couple things happening at once. | ||
| First off, if you figure out a trick that will silence your opponents and it consistently works, you're going to keep going back to it. | ||
| And that almost explains why we're in the hysterical place that we're at right now, where this thing, this sort of hysteria around the left, where they're just attacking everybody. | ||
| And if Nancy Pelosi says something about AOC, then AOC says Nancy Pelosi's a racist. | ||
| Because it's a snake that eats its own tail. | ||
| But there's a reason for that, which is, if you own the media, if you own the establishment, if you own the parameters and the Overton window that the conversation's allowed to exist in, Well then, when people start making some good points, and eventually those cries stop working, you've gotten fat on not working out, not working out your ideas. | ||
| So if you say, I mean this is, I see this all the time, when I started sort of evolving on some of this stuff, I always tell people I really believe the same things that I've always believed. | ||
| I would say the one place that I've really shifted is economics, where I certainly have shifted more right. | ||
| And if you say to somebody, you know, I'm for low taxes, if you say to a lefty, I'm for low taxes, You will often find, I'm sure you guys have had this happen to you at college, they will say, you're racist. | ||
| And you say, well, what? | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| And they say, well, if you're for low taxes, that means you don't want to help poor people. | ||
| And if you don't want to help poor people, that somehow means you don't want to help black people. | ||
| And if you don't want to help black people, you're racist. | ||
| And they take you on this crazy adventure through that. | ||
| Now, you can give them all the numbers, right, where the more we pour money into these places and into these districts. | ||
| You could look at all the places where black unemployment's the highest and it's always Democrat-run cities | ||
| and all of those things. They're not going to really respond to that. | ||
| But eventually, I really believe this, and I think this is why probably people care about my show, | ||
| eventually, if you do your best to just be a little bit better than them | ||
| and calmly try to explain to them that just because you feel something is right, | ||
| it feels right to say, "Oh, somebody's poor. I want to give them something." | ||
| Now, they never want to give it themselves, right? | ||
| They want somebody else to give it. | ||
| But it feels, oh, somebody's poor. | ||
| I'm going to give them something, or any of these things. | ||
| It all feels right. | ||
| And that's why Shapiro's line, Ben Shapiro's line, facts don't care about your feelings, | ||
| that's why that really took off. | ||
| Because if you can sit there with them long enough to get them over their feelings-- | ||
| and it ain't going to be easy, and I guarantee you everyone in this room has lost friends probably over | ||
| politics, and probably not by your choice. | ||
| It's pretty rare that I find a conservative, or a libertarian, or a classical liberal that just can't take somebody | ||
| on the left anymore. | ||
| It usually is the other way, because they will say all those awful things about you. | ||
| But if you're a little bit better than them, and it's going to take practice and patience, | ||
| then I think you can break through to them. | ||
| And that's what I've tried to do with my show, to varying degrees of success, I suppose. | ||
| Yeah, a million YouTube subscribers. | ||
| We're trying to reach that. | ||
| Yeah, we'll get there someday. | ||
| So I want to talk a little bit more about kind of the mob mentality because I think that you've been kind of at the forefront of trying to, I shouldn't say trying, but having to cope with this. | ||
| You know, being somebody that has transitioned, you know, from kind of, I mean, the Young Turks to being more classical liberal, it's got to be interesting for you to witness, I would say, this, you know, cancel culture on steroids. | ||
| You know, we got a lot of fire this week as we put out a piece in the Washington Times about this whole Dave Chappelle special and just, you know, how we shouldn't. | ||
| It's a shame to see the gut reaction from so many people that are just commenting or even some journalists that put out, you know, that YouTube should pull this down or Netflix should pull this down. | ||
| And do you think it gets worse before it gets better? | ||
| Do we hit a point where it's like, you know, something, I mean Chappelle talked about this, where something you tweeted when you were 20 years old, a lot of people in this room are going to be in that age bracket. | ||
| Are we going to hit a spot where people are numb to it and it's like, listen, we all did that stuff. | ||
| Well, we better get to that place. | ||
| When do we get there? | ||
| The thing is, we have to get there. | ||
| If we don't get to the place that we're all not trying to cancel each other, we will all cancel each other. | ||
| We will end up in a totalitarian state, not necessarily because of the government, which I know for most people in this room, that's the big fear. | ||
| It will be because we have silenced ourselves. | ||
| I mean, the amount of people that I meet that are just good, decent people, right? | ||
| Like, just decent people, that tell me all the time, I'm afraid to say what I think. | ||
| I'm afraid to post that. | ||
| People will tell me they're afraid to post my videos. | ||
| And I'll go, think about this. | ||
| We're not in Pakistan, where if you're a blogger, you could be shot on the street. | ||
| We're not there yet, but we actually could start viewing there if every time A good person like you guys, if every time you won't say what you think, especially when you're 18, 19 years old, you guys will never have more passion and wherewithal and lack of world weariness to say what you think than right now. | ||
| It doesn't get easier. | ||
| I think there's this belief for a lot of college students that somehow like, oh, if I can just suck it up now, don't say what I think now, get the grades so I can get into grad school, get into grad school so I can get the job. | ||
| If I can just be quiet now, later on I'll start saying what I think. | ||
| And it's like, that is the reverse of reality. | ||
| I don't know if you guys know this, but one day you're going to have to have a job, and then you're going to have a house, and a car, and a dog, and a wife, or a husband, and kids. | ||
| And so you're going to have all this shit, and you're going to go, now I'm going to start telling the world what I think? | ||
| No. | ||
| Every day that you don't do it is just chipping off your ability to ultimately do it. | ||
| So you've got to fight it. | ||
| And trust me. | ||
| They haven't killed any of us yet. | ||
| I mean, for those of you that, you know, yet here in America, I mean, really think of it. | ||
| That was sad that you had to laugh at that. | ||
| But think about that. | ||
| I mean, for the people that have been on my show that you know that have survived the mob, Jordan Peterson survived the mob. | ||
| Why did the mob come after him? | ||
| Because all he said was, I'm not against trans people, but I don't want the government Uh, to be able to dictate my speech relative to what pronouns I use when referring to them. | ||
| He said, I'll treat trans people respectfully if they treat me respectfully, but the government can't come and say that. | ||
| The mob went after him, tried to destroy him. | ||
| Brett Weinstein didn't want the school where he worked, Evergreen State, to be segregated one day a year based on the color of skin. | ||
| I'm pretty sure Martin Luther King would have been down with that. | ||
| The mob tried to destroy him. | ||
| Brett didn't get destroyed. | ||
| These guys are bigger now. | ||
| and use their examples. | ||
| Lindsey Shepard from Wilfrid Laurier, who all she did was show a video of Jordan Peterson | ||
| in a class as a TA, and they tried to destroy her. | ||
| They will keep doing it, but if you show a little bravery, you can spread that bravery to an untold amount of people. | ||
| And we have a bravery deficit in the country right now, and we have a group of people that are more than happy | ||
| to take advantage of that. | ||
| Let me talk to you about one of the things that you did that I think was one of the most courageous | ||
| or fiscally irresponsible decisions I've seen. | ||
| Oh, good God, I've made several of these moves, so I don't know where you're going. | ||
| So, you know, you're taking yourself off some of these platforms, you know, | ||
| whether it's Patreon, YouTube, I mean, I wanna talk a little bit about just kind of big tech | ||
| and where you think the, [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| Not to say where is it going, but give me, I mean, kind of your analysis for students. | ||
| What do you think has happened that has forced these tech companies to get to a point where, I mean, we're clearly seeing some bias, we're clearly seeing some censorship, and I want to ask this question again. | ||
| I mean, does it get better or do we just see the marketplace work where people actually leave some of these mega tech corporations? | ||
| And I'm also going to throw this in there. | ||
| A lot of individuals, and I will give you credit for this, have jumped to say that government should be stepping in and dictating how these companies can operate. | ||
| Now, I don't take that stance. | ||
| I haven't seen you take that stance. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| But I worry because, I mean, you see people like Josh Hawley and some of these other conservatives who, that's what they're trying to do. | ||
| They're trying to almost fight fire with fire and get the government involved. | ||
| So think about what an interesting situation we have right now. | ||
| Right before I went off the grid for the month for August, which I think we're going to talk about, I threw public pressure. | ||
| It was the only way I could get a response out of YouTube. | ||
| I had to keep shaming them on Twitter because one of their whistleblowers that came out that was an employee of Google specifically said my name as one of the people that they're censoring. | ||
| So I kept going on Twitter and I kept tagging Susan Wojcicki, who's the YouTube CEO, and finally she followed me and we had a video call, a Skype call. | ||
| It was off the record. | ||
| Then I was going up to Silicon Valley, so we had a meeting, again, off the record, and I won't repeat anything that was said off the record, but I will say one thing that I told her at the end. | ||
| I said, you know, I'm basically the last guy That's not calling for government intervention right now. | ||
| I mean, think about this. | ||
| Elizabeth Warren wants to break up big tech, and Tucker Carlson wants to break up big tech. | ||
| They agree on basically nothing. | ||
| Now, I obviously, generally speaking, I agree far more with Tucker Carlson than I do with Elizabeth Warren, and Tucker's a friend and a nice guy, but this is a really interesting spot. | ||
| If you're a liberty-loving person, if you're a limited government person, and yet you understand That we are in a truly unique position right now. | ||
| What is happening with big tech, the amount of information that Google controls, the amount they know about every single thing that you do, that every single one of us has an iPhone or something like it in our pocket, the way they can use the algorithms to make you think a certain way, the way that if you start thinking one way, they can actually shift the way you think by suggesting certain videos and not suggesting other things, The way they can shadow ban you on Twitter, and the way that you can subscribe to videos and then not get from a certain creator because that doesn't fall in line with what they like. | ||
| This is a problem that is almost unthinkably huge. | ||
| But is this the moment that we then want to then give the power to the government? | ||
| Yaron Brook from ARI, from Ayn Rand Institute, who I'm sure many of you guys know, | ||
| I did a panel with him discussing this, and he said the sort of purist attitude on this, | ||
| which is, well, if you don't have principles when they matter, then what's the point of having them? | ||
| And I am trying my hardest, as someone that makes a living doing this, | ||
| that is trying to communicate the ideas that I believe in, I am trying my hardest not to be one of those people | ||
| that at the end is just gonna be like, you know what, fuck it, regulate the hell out of them. | ||
| I don't want that. | ||
| So I'm working on some tech stuff myself, which we just announced recently. | ||
| And my hope is that in all movements, whether they're political movements or social movements | ||
| or whatever, a lot of people do things differently. | ||
| MLK did things a certain way, and Malcolm X did things a different way. | ||
| And in comedy, somebody like Chris Rock is gonna curse a lot, and then, | ||
| I was gonna say Bill Cosby, but somebody like Bill Cosby did some other shit, but the point is people are different. | ||
| That's what I'm trying to say. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Um, and, and so my position will be, I am going to put as much pressure as I can on them as a public figure, uh, to change. | ||
| I'm going to use the market as I can. | ||
| I can use my voice, the tools that they give us, and maybe they'll boot me from these things and we'll see. | ||
| Uh, but hopefully I, I just believe that the free market's the way to do it. | ||
| You know, I live in California. | ||
| State income tax on a California state website. | ||
| It looks like Prodigy from 1988. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So the idea that the government's going to come in and a govern... I mean, try to imagine when they say break up big tech, what are you saying? | ||
| You don't have a government regulator, right? | ||
| Like some average schmo that knows nothing about nothing walking to Google and fix the problem. | ||
| Like, it's actually crazy. | ||
| But I did tell Susan, I said, I am the last guy. | ||
| So work with me here. | ||
| I don't know that they're going to work with me, but we'll see. | ||
| But I think this is really the issue of our time. | ||
| Because if you guys can't communicate with each other, if you are afraid that the platforms that you're on are going to come get you, coupled with the political madness that we're in, man, what a toxic still we have. | ||
| So we have to start fixing this. | ||
| you know one of the things that we really try to teach is this idea of effectively using your time uh... and i think the role of social media you know when it comes to when we're trying to advance ideas uh... you know the joke at young americans for liberty is don't waste your time getting these social media arguments you know we see these trolls and different people are coming after you all the time but what's interesting to me Is, you know, you take a month-long hiatus. | ||
| This is your third year doing it, I believe. | ||
| So I think you guys all find this fascinating. | ||
| A month, totally unplugged, no cell phone, no internet, no newspaper, not getting any updates. | ||
| Why do you do it? | ||
| And I'm very jealous that you do this. | ||
| You know, what would have kind of been the Outcomes of it. | ||
| What does it produce? | ||
| Do you get to see an outsider's view? | ||
| Because I think that sometimes we don't realize how much does control us. | ||
| And I don't mean that in a biased way. | ||
| Somebody's pulling the strings. | ||
| I think that we are. | ||
| We look at our phone constantly. | ||
| We don't even realize we're scrolling on Facebook sometimes. | ||
| 30 days, 33 days, you know, a month-long hiatus. | ||
| It does sound pretty refreshing. | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, think about it this way, you know, I'm not that much older than you guys. | ||
| I'm 43, which I guess feels kind of older, right? | ||
| But it's not, I'm not that old, right? | ||
| And I remember when I was a junior in college, was the first time that I, or sophomore in college, I think it was the first time that I saw A visual internet. | ||
| I remember before that we had an email address, but I didn't even know what you could do with it, or who you would message, or why you would do it. | ||
| It didn't even have your name. | ||
| It was just like a crazy series of characters. | ||
| But I remember I was a sophomore in college, and a guy down the hall started screaming that he was on the World Wide Web. | ||
| And a bunch of us like ran into his room, and there was his little screen, you know, little... Damn, you are old. | ||
| Oh, I'm old, man! | ||
| And it was just in color. | ||
| It was incredible. | ||
| And it had a Yankees logo and a Royals logo, and it said, Yankees 3, Royals 1. | ||
| And I swear to God, I remember saying, this is the stupidest thing I have ever seen. | ||
| I kid you not, I remember saying that. | ||
| Because it was like, well, why wouldn't I have just got the score on SportsCenter an hour later | ||
| or something like that? | ||
| Things have changed so fast right now. | ||
| And the amount of information we're being constantly slammed with, that any morning you can | ||
| wake up and decide to try to destroy the life of another human | ||
| you've never heard of who lives halfway across the world, or they might try to do that to you. | ||
| And then all the good stuff, too, all the incredible stuff, right? | ||
| Like, I'm a product of the Internet. | ||
| I think that the conversations that I've had on the show have helped stem the tide of some of this stuff, and in some ways turn the tide. | ||
| But I think we have no idea how the internet is actually changing us, that all of us are walking around with a | ||
| device in our pocket that connects us to the rest of the world. | ||
| We know revolutions have started because of this. | ||
| Just look at Egypt or rear square a couple years ago. | ||
| Look what's happening in Hong Kong right now. | ||
| But what I felt was, because of the craziness of social media and that on any given morning, I can-- | ||
| my phone, I try not to bring my phone in my bedroom anymore, but if I just took my phone off my nightstand and | ||
| I look through Twitter, the first thing I could see is that a | ||
| pink anime fox is telling me that I'm an asshole. | ||
| That's not a great way to start the day, you know what I mean? | ||
| And yet we all do it. | ||
| We look at our phones in bed, people are talking to us to our face, and our reaction time is slower. | ||
| We don't know what it's doing to our memory, we don't know what it's doing to our ability to be social, to our ability to look at other people as human beings, to actually look someone in the eye when you're talking to them. | ||
| I mean, all of these things, I think, are rapidly changing. | ||
| So I did it three years ago, sort of just as a test. | ||
| Just could I do it? | ||
| And then I really, I loved it. | ||
| I mean, I felt calmer and more patient. | ||
| And, you know, we still put videos up because, you know, if you disappear from the internet for a month, everyone thinks you're gone altogether. | ||
| But it's getting harder and harder to do because I have a bigger business now. | ||
| We have more employees. | ||
| I mean, it's a great set of problems that I have. | ||
| I mean, literally this last time, your book came out, what, like three days before the | ||
| pre-order? | ||
| Yeah, my book came out three days before. | ||
| We hit number three on Amazon just on pre-sales, nine months before the book came out. | ||
| We just hired a whole bunch more people. | ||
| I just announced a couple days ago we're doing this deal with The Blaze. | ||
| I have so much going on, which is all great. | ||
| It's all great, but in a way, that made it clearer to me that I had to take some time | ||
| off. | ||
| Just think about it for you guys. | ||
| You guys are in college. | ||
| When's the last time you just took a day off? | ||
| Just a day, once a week. | ||
| When I tweet about sometimes taking weekends off, Ben Shapiro will be like, "Yeah, the | ||
| Jews have been doing it for about 4,000 years." | ||
| It's like one day a week, the Sabbath. | ||
| It doesn't matter what religion, but whatever the holy day might be. | ||
| There's some value in stepping away from some of that because it's crazy. | ||
| I know most people can't do that amount of time and it was weird, man. | ||
| And you know, the other thing that was fun was that people were keeping me honest because wherever I went, People would come up to me and say, I'm at Whole Foods. | ||
| And people would say, you're not really off the grid. | ||
| Come on, you've got a phone in your pocket. | ||
| And I literally would have to take my stuff out of my pockets and show people I have no phone, no nothing. | ||
| I didn't know anything about the news. | ||
| You know that T word that everyone says all the time? | ||
| Trump. | ||
| Have you heard about this guy? | ||
| I did not hear anything about Trump, basically, for 33 days. | ||
| Love him or hate him, it doesn't matter. | ||
| It was just nice to just escape the madness a little bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I want to get into some of the issues because I think your perspective of coming from the left I think you, I get very frustrated when the left is hypocritical on some issues, because there's people who believe in civil liberties, individual liberty, peace, you know, some of these things that we see, hey, let's just be consistent on it. | ||
| You know, when you went from Obama, well, from Bush to Obama, you saw a lot of Republicans who, you know, either didn't say anything under Bush or they changed their tune under Obama, and you see the same thing, you know, as the President switches parties. | ||
| But like, war is the issue that just rubs me. | ||
| I don't understand how somebody can claim to be anti-war, understand putting the troops first, this idea that we shouldn't be nation-building, having troops in 120 countries, you stand up against it, Then Obama gets elected. | ||
| All of a sudden, the anti-war left disappears. | ||
| I'm actually surprised that they haven't come back. | ||
| I'm surprised. | ||
| I mean, I haven't seen them or heard them, especially not at that level. | ||
| Do you think the anti-war left is going to come back? | ||
| Is that issue gone for them? | ||
| Because Trump, with this America First foreign policy, you can think whatever you want about the actions. | ||
| His rhetoric, I would argue he's been one of the most peaceful, with his rhetoric, presidents probably in the last 30 to 40 years. | ||
| But I'm not hearing that, obviously, from the left. | ||
| Yeah, well it goes to, there's so much there, right? | ||
| So one of the things right before the election, so say the six months before the 2016 election, | ||
| when Trump was really gaining steam and suddenly, you know, Trump's a Nazi, | ||
| all his supporters are alt-right and racists and all of this stuff. | ||
| I did many videos on how this is a huge, it's just a tactical mistake, if nothing else, by the left. | ||
| You cannot label all your supporters, and you can't say Trump's Hitler, because what might happen, and I think this is what has happened, is if you keep saying this guy's Hitler, well, you're painting yourself into an intellectual corner, because what happens if he turns out not to be Hitler? | ||
| And let's say, You know, he lowers some taxes. | ||
| Let's say the economy's doing well. | ||
| Let's say he doesn't try to nation-build and get us into all of these wars. | ||
| Well, you can't turn around and be like, oh, you know, that Hitler guy's not that bad, right? | ||
| So you're really, right? | ||
| Like, you really have put, you've boxed yourself in. | ||
| It's not what you've done to him, it's what you've done to yourself. | ||
| And I think that's partly why there's such chaos right now. | ||
| Because the economy's doing well, we're not going to war. | ||
| One of the things I just found out, because I was gone, Was that he's now trying to put an end to the Afghanistan war, which people don't realize it, but it is the longest war in American history. | ||
| Nobody even knows why we're there anymore. | ||
| Like, let's leave. | ||
| And most-- yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
[APPLAUSE] | |
| [INAUDIBLE] | ||
| What was that? | ||
| [INAUDIBLE] | ||
| Oh, bring them home. | ||
| I thought it was build the wall. | ||
| I was like, alright. | ||
| All right, libertarians, you're always keeping me on my toes! | ||
| Just for the record, bring them home were the three words. | ||
| Okay, just to be very clear, yeah, it was bring them home, yes. | ||
| But to specifically your question about the anti-war left, I mean, think about this. | ||
| So Tulsi Gabbard, who is by far... Yeah, well, I'm glad you're applauding her, because she was literally DMing me as I was backstage, and I think we have her on on Sunday. | ||
| It's going to be our first weekend livestream ever. | ||
| Now it better happen now that I announced it. | ||
| But think about this. | ||
| Tulsi Gabbard, who she served in the American military, right? | ||
| She just went back, I think, to do a little, you know, some of the extra duty. | ||
| She's absolutely anti-war. | ||
| Clearly, you know, if there's a neocon here, she's the 180 of that. | ||
| Well, what happened the more that she started to gain traction? | ||
| Suddenly, all of these hit pieces were coming out in BuzzFeed and HuffPo and Vox and all the usual journalistic places, and I use quotes around that, obviously, that she's conservative and she's liked by the right. | ||
| And I thought, this is really bizarre. | ||
| So you're telling me now that anti-war is a conservative position. | ||
| So I don't know what has happened. | ||
| I mean, I think the DNC is such a corrupt Twisted organization, and it's so clear. | ||
| Look, they screwed Bernie over last time, they're screwing over Andrew Yang now, and they'll figure out a way to screw over whoever they have to to get whatever it is they want. | ||
| I'm actually not even sure what they want anymore, because Biden's head's probably going | ||
| to explode before the election. | ||
| And Biden, by far, in my opinion, the best one of them. | ||
| That's just a sad ... I actually feel bad for the guy. | ||
| I didn't even mean to be so glib when I said that. | ||
| He's clearly having some health issues, and I think there's some cognitive stuff happening. | ||
| I don't even think he wanted to run. | ||
| But yeah, the Democrats, for as crazy as things are for the Republicans, because there's Trumpism, | ||
| and then there's pretty much everything else, and how do those things work together, for | ||
| as crazy as that may feel, what's happening to the Democrats because of the lunacy that | ||
| the progressives have just spread everywhere is immeasurably worse, I think. | ||
| Let me put you on the spot. | ||
| Who do you think, if you had to bet today, who do you think wins it? | ||
| Wins from the Democrats or wins the election? | ||
| Yeah, just the Democrats. | ||
| My guess, I mean, it's such a depressing group of people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like... It really is. | |
| It's like every time I've watched a debate or I listen to any of them talk, it's like... | ||
| Why would I want you involved in my life? | ||
| Go away! | ||
| Go somewhere else and bother other people! | ||
| By the way, that's another reason that you can really unfurl the lunacy of leftism really easily, because if they had a consistent set of views... So you can say what you want about the right, but the right basically, and certainly in this room, What does the right care about? | ||
| The individual. | ||
| That every single one of us should have individual rights that are exactly the same, regardless of the color of your skin, or your gender, or any of those things. | ||
| I can't look at any... I mean, think how depressingly twisted it would be if I looked at any of you and I was like, oh, she's black, so she must think this, or he's gay, so he must think this, or something like that. | ||
| But yet, that is what the left is doing, and that's so ironic right now, because if you really believe As so many of the progressives do, that Trump is Hitler and evil and all of those things. | ||
| Well, the answer isn't, it's just to get our guy to be in that position of power. | ||
| The answer is let's take the power away from that office, which is how it was supposed to be set up in the first | ||
| place So if you were a betting man you'd put your money oh, so I | ||
| didn't answer the question How about that? | ||
| That's a professional move for you guys. | ||
| You just talk long enough so that they forget what the question was. | ||
| Obama used to do that all the time. | ||
| Do you remember the Obama press conferences? | ||
| That way they would be like, uh, Mr. President, you know, what's the temperature outside? | ||
| Like six hours later, like, okay. | ||
| If I was a betting person, I think it's probably going to be Elizabeth Warren. | ||
| I almost see sort of, yeah, but I could say anything. | ||
| You'd boo any of them. | ||
| They're all terrible. | ||
| They're horrible. | ||
| I mean, even, did you watch this climate change summit? | ||
| The amount of lunacy. | ||
| Bernie was literally demanding that we offer free abortions to people in South America to stop climate change. | ||
| I mean, that's how... | ||
| I'm not making that up. | ||
| I am not making that up. | ||
| We used to. | ||
| There used to be some American program where we would offer abortion services in other countries, which, what does that have to do with, shouldn't we be doing things in our country? | ||
| Forget abortion specifically. | ||
| But he literally was bringing that up, that if we don't reenact this policy, that that, you know, populate, I mean, he wants, he's Thanos, basically. | ||
| I would vote for Thanos before I would vote for any of these people. | ||
| So I think Elizabeth Warren probably, I think the most beautiful part of watching it all unfold will be the way that they have to destroy Bernie. | ||
| Because Bernie, he has to be destroyed. | ||
| He's an old white man at the end. | ||
| And at the end, that is how they will judge him, and they will take him out because that's how the game is played. | ||
| And if you remember in the last go-round with this, you remember that moment where Bernie was on stage | ||
| and the Black Lives Matter activists grabbed the mic out of his hand | ||
| and he just moved over and stood there like a little bitch. | ||
| (audience laughing) | ||
| I'm okay on the language, right? We're good? Yeah. | ||
| But there's a reason he did it. | ||
| It wasn't because it was what he believed he should do. | ||
| It was because by the intersectional game that the progressives have created, he knew if he grabbed the mic back at his own event from Black Lives Matter activists, they were going to say he was racist and destroy him. | ||
| So they are just buying their time to take out Bernie at some point. | ||
| And Elizabeth Warren will have to do it. | ||
| And then I think it sets up, you know, then there's a woman running against Trump. | ||
| I mean, it just gets this all to the zenith of lunacy. | ||
| Let me ask you about one of the things that kind of I always see as a debate or a discussion is the idea of educating or maybe focusing more on some of the cultural things versus the political arena. | ||
| I think you coming through, you know, the comedian side to Young Turks and obviously now there's transformation and having your own platform, being a personality. | ||
| Do you think that you have changed your mind on this? | ||
| Do you think that there is one? | ||
| Because my take has always been that there's got to be a balance, right? | ||
| I think if you have a core set of principles, you go out, you engage folks, you figure out ways to connect with them, whether it's through culture, whether it's through education, but then the political arena has just been bidding the shit out of us for the past 30 years, so you can't ignore that side. | ||
| Do you agree with kind of that take that there's a hybrid, or do you think We need to be able, you know, we're failing in one section | ||
| and we're gaining in another. | ||
| What's kind of your... | ||
| Well, as I referenced earlier with MLK and Malcolm X, whatever the movement is, whatever | ||
| you care about is, there's many ways to skin a cat, right? | ||
| And I think you need people that can purely deal with things at the idea level, right? | ||
| That can really lay out simple principles. | ||
| So I try, when I have somebody like, let's say, Jordan Peterson on who's talking about Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and some seriously high-level stuff, I think one of the things I'm good at is distilling some of that so that the average person who maybe can't read all of these things or take all of this in can digest it and hopefully find a path where they can, you know, find out more if that's what they want to do. | ||
| And I think In this political atmosphere that we need, we need people to understand, I think, the basics of the founding of the country, of the principles of individualism, understand why the Constitution was written, why they write it the way that they did, what does the Bill of Rights actually mean, all of these things. | ||
| Understand why did they write. | ||
| Regardless of your feelings about religion, why did they say these were God-given rights and that it wasn't the government that was giving you those rights? | ||
| These are deeply important things to understand. | ||
| But if you're only going to talk about that, you're not going to get these guys. | ||
| And what does get these guys is comedy, is memes, is shitposting. | ||
| I mean, it's all of those things. | ||
| So you need some version of all of that, and everyone plays a little bit of a different role in that. | ||
| So I think the important thing, and this is what I would say about anything, you should do what you think you should do. | ||
| And if you do that, and you're an idea guy, and you do it well, you'll affect people. | ||
| And if you do that and you're funny, you'll affect people. | ||
| And whatever that means to you, you've got to hit it on many fronts. | ||
| But this is where-- I mean, I always tell you, it's like I love coming to these YAL things, | ||
| because for whatever little differences we have, it's utter-- I know none of you actually-- that would never | ||
| cause an irreparable problem for us. | ||
| Like, I know you guys want to work through issues. | ||
| If I had a difference of opinion, we could, you know, have a drink after or talk it out. | ||
| I mean, we have some difference of opinion and we can battle that through. | ||
| And that's what I meant before about just being a little bit better than the other guys. | ||
| Because they're pretty hysterical right now, and if we just show, oh, you know what? | ||
| Somebody's a little more conservative on, say, abortion than I am, and I'm a little more hardcore on low taxes or states' rights than they are, but we basically want to live in the same country. | ||
| Well, now we can start expanding the tent. | ||
| And the progressives are just purging people, right? | ||
| That's what they're doing. | ||
| They're taking good, decent liberals like me, like Brett Weinstein, who I talked about before, or his brother Eric Weinstein. | ||
| Plenty, I mean, there's a zillion people. | ||
| Sam Harris, a million people. | ||
| Actually, it's many millions of decent liberals, because decent liberals do exist, but they've been cowed into silence, so why not, as the progressives are purging all of their free thinkers, and it's not even that they're purely free thinkers, they're just somebody that might have one random other thought, while they're purging them, why not have the people, especially on the liberty side of things, really show, yeah, I'm willing to agree to disagree, and I want to live in a country where my neighbor can think something different. | ||
| That sounds pretty great to me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
(audience applauds) | |
| So I wanna talk about Jordan Peterson. | ||
| Many of you know, Dave toured with Jordan, talking to thousands of people. | ||
| What fascinates me about Jordan Peterson, I cannot stop watching the interview he did, the one that, you know, kind of went off, where I felt like every single time he would say anything. | ||
| What's her name? | ||
| Kathy Newman. | ||
| Yeah, Kathy Newman would say... So what you're saying is... What you're saying is, and she'd fill in the blank, and to hear Jordan, who at the time when I first watched this, I didn't know who he was, I didn't know any of his beliefs, but to hear him say No, I'm not saying that at all! | ||
| Right? | ||
| That was a pretty decent Peterson. | ||
| You see how the voice kind of froggified there? | ||
| That was good. | ||
| But when he would say that, it resonated with so much of, not just what I've been through, but with so many of our student activists when it's like, you know, anything you say is just immediately paraphrased into this horrific, you know, it's just factually not correct. | ||
| So, I guess my question, I have a few questions about Peterson, but I want to kind of open it up to Why do you think people reacted the way they did? | ||
| Let's not even say, I mean, when the mob went after him, but just... I mean, it wasn't like they went after him. | ||
| I mean, he just took off. | ||
| And with you being on the road with him, and you kind of understanding him at a much deeper level, you know, what do you think really sparked kind of this Peterson mania of You know, yeah, I agree with this guy, and he's just saying things I'm not used to hearing. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think you hit the nail on the head related to the Kathy Newman thing, because so many of us, we're dealing with that all the time, that you're just trying to lay out a simple, perhaps hard truth, and what you get in exchange is, you know, so what you're saying is, or you're a bigot or a racist or the rest of it, and there's a beautiful moment in that where he says something to the effect of, well, you don't mind offending me, No, that wasn't so good. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Because he basically was saying, well, she was saying to him, you might be offending trans people or whatever. | ||
| And his point was, well, you don't mind offending me. | ||
| But she had, as a lefty, she has this hierarchical category of who can be offended and all that. | ||
| I think that moment took off because of that, because it was just a simple example of keeping your cool, | ||
| knowing what you're saying. | ||
| And then really, the moment where Kathy kind of couldn't speak, because you could | ||
| see the conflicting ideas that just sat in her head all sort | ||
| of colliding into each other. | ||
| So she really couldn't get out of it. | ||
| And you know, the funny part is that right after that-- | ||
| I wonder how many of you guys know this-- | ||
| within hours after the clip started going viral, she was taking selfies and doing a video, I think, | ||
| in her car with a co-worker, talking about all the trolls that were coming after her. | ||
| But then once it really caught on, next thing you know, she started playing the victim. | ||
| And now, you know, she's getting death threats and all these things. | ||
| And it's all not true, but she then realized the power of playing the victim in all that. | ||
| Instead of actually going into a conversation and knowing what you're talking about enough | ||
| to be able to have that back and forth. | ||
| Just broadly on Jordan, the best thing that I can say about Jordan-- so we did about 110 stops | ||
| in a year. | ||
| It was incredible. | ||
| We went to dozens of countries. | ||
| Truly the best thing that I can say about Jordan is he is the real deal. | ||
| I have never met someone in this space that the exact man that you guys know, that you watch these videos of, is the exact guy the second the cameras go off. | ||
| I never saw him be rude. | ||
| To anyone, anywhere. | ||
| I mean, try to imagine the amount of people that would come up to us everywhere. | ||
| Airports, bathrooms, restaurants, all the time. | ||
| It's a minute before a show, he's running late. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| Ask them how they're doing, what their name is. | ||
| And the other thing, and this is probably more important, I never saw him break one of the 12 rules. | ||
| He had many opportunities that he could have lied to somebody about, oh, I can't talk because I got to go, or whatever. | ||
| He never broke one of the 12 rules. | ||
| As a matter of fact, there was one night Some of you guys may have seen the picture. | ||
| We were in London, and Jordan and I and Majid Nawaz, who you probably know, had dinner at Douglas Murray's flat. | ||
| That's apartment in Londonese. | ||
| And we had dinner there, and one of the rules is, is it the 12th rule? | ||
| Maybe the 11th rule about petting a cat if you see one on the street. | ||
| And really what he's saying there is, don't forget to stop and smell the roses. | ||
| So Douglas had a cat, and we're in there for about three hours. | ||
| We're eating, we're drinking, we're having a great time. | ||
| And I noticed about three, four hours in, and I had had plenty of drinks, I was like, | ||
| I don't think Jordan has pet this cat. | ||
| And I was like, if he doesn't pet this cat, the guy's a fraud. | ||
| Like-- | ||
|
unidentified
|
[LAUGHTER] | |
| And I couldn't-- and then, you know, like, then we're like five hours in, I'm really drunk, and I'm like, | ||
| is this guy going to pet-- | ||
| I couldn't stop thinking about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If he doesn't pet this cat, I'm on tour with the biggest fraud in the history of the world. | |
| Anyway, we're saying our goodbyes. | ||
| Jordan gets on the ground. | ||
| Now, Jordan's really tall, and he gets on the ground and sits with the cat, basically sitting in the cat's bed, just a little flat bed. | ||
| I mean, you can picture it, because you can sort of picture Jordan's hands, and just petting, petting, petting the cat. | ||
| All right, the gig goes on. | ||
| We're gonna be okay. | ||
| Yeah, he's a great guy, and he's the real deal, and he's serious about his ideas, and I'm a better person for having done the tour, truly. | ||
| Yeah, good for you. | ||
| The thing that fascinates me, I see this a lot when people have opinions, Uh, it's very easy to, what I should say, it's difficult to state an opinion that you know is going to be against the grain. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you know that, I wouldn't say it's controversial, but you know is, you know, the person saying it feels it or knows it as fact, um, believes it as fact, and then they kind of stop. | ||
| And I think that's just one other note I want to make from that interview, where it's like, you know, he would say something and stop. | ||
| And it's just so not accepted in society to say some of the things he would say without like, but, you know, this, this, and this, or, you know, I believe this. | ||
| That's an opinion. | ||
| I mean, he just would say it. | ||
| Well, the irony, of course, was that every time the media would try to sandbag him and try to destroy him, which we saw many times, you guys may remember that one of the biggest moments was when the New York Times wrote that piece that Jordan is for enforced monogamy. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| And everyone made it sound like he wants to basically make women slaves and we're going to be in the Handmaid's Tale. | ||
| Enforced monogamy just means marriage. | ||
| If you look, actually, Eric Weinstein checked on the New York Times archives, the only other | ||
| two references to enforced monogamy are positive references about marriage, that marriage is | ||
| a fundamental building block for a Western society. | ||
| It causes us to reproduce and have familial bonds and all of these things. | ||
| But the more they attacked him by him just keeping his cool, and this is a good lesson | ||
| for any of you guys if you're ever going to be brave enough to say anything you believe | ||
| in, the more they attacked him, the more he stood his ground. | ||
| He would say, "By nature, I'm not a combative person," and that's hard to believe when you | ||
| see these people that are in these fights constantly. | ||
| But he would stand his ground, say what he believes, and say simple truths. | ||
| I'm not against trans people, but the government can't tell me what to call somebody. | ||
| I'm for marriage. | ||
| I mean, you know, basic stuff. | ||
| And if you do that, and you don't lose your cool, well, he's a worldwide phenomenon, and those things go hand in hand. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I want to go back to, you know, we talk free speech kind of as a broad tent, but I want to talk, you know, specifically a lot of the students in the room and kind of this campus culture of free speech. | ||
| You know, you see a lot of comedians that won't go to campus just because of some of the backlash and the current environment that's been created. | ||
| So, one of the things that I really think is missing amongst the libertarian and conservative crowd is this idea that we continue to say campus is biased, campus shuts down our speakers, they don't recognize our student organizations, they don't let us get rooms, you know, to actually have speakers or meetings. | ||
| But then we don't do anything about it. | ||
| And about three, almost four years ago now, we launched a program called the National Fight for Free Speech Campaign with the idea of saying, let's stop just complaining. | ||
| Let's figure out what are these bureaucrats and the college administrators doing to shut down our groups or to shut down speakers. | ||
| And you have certain campuses need to get a permission slip to go out and do activism and talk to people. | ||
| A lot of them will charge the outrageous security fees to bring speakers to campus. | ||
| And I love how you say that, it's the new one, because what happens is, and these are typically, you know, liberal campus bureaucrats, somebody tries a new code or a new policy and it works, and then all of a sudden you see other people picking it up. | ||
| Well, we used to, when we're trying to combat them, we will try to purposefully do an event | ||
| that is against the code. | ||
| So let's say they have these free speech zones, right? | ||
| They say, okay, listen, it's a public school, we're supposed to uphold the First Amendment, | ||
| but just to protect everyone, we have a small zone, it's the size of, let's say, an iPhone on a tennis court, | ||
| right, if that's the campus, and this is where you're able to speak freely. | ||
| Well, we will purposefully do an event outside of it. | ||
| and it's funny we used to do a free speech wall | ||
| The university said, it's a fire hazard, right? | ||
| I mean, they're very smart. | ||
| Maniacally smart, these administrators. | ||
| So then we, to push back, now we do free speech beach balls. | ||
| These giant beach balls we roll around campus. | ||
| But we do these events, but it's crazy to me that college administrators will shut down Not a controversial opinion. | ||
| I mean, they do that, and I don't believe they should be doing that. | ||
| But we have students who have handed out pocket constitutions. | ||
| They've gotten arrested and put in jail. | ||
| The document literally has the First Amendment written in it. | ||
| So what do you think has caused this authoritarian belief? | ||
| And do you really think it's that administrators want to protect students? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Or is it more of a control thing? | ||
| No, it's neither. | ||
| It's actually, it goes back to the core of what I talked about are the factory settings before, and it goes back to what has happened with the modern left that has that in academia more than anywhere else. | ||
| I mean, this is where this whole horrible set of ideas of postmodernism took root, and all of these people know. | ||
| The administrators and the faculty know. | ||
| If they, with a few exceptions, University of Chicago is pretty good on it, and there's | ||
| a couple other schools that are fighting for free speech. | ||
| But they know, as an administrator, that if they dare stand up and defend Ben Shapiro's | ||
| ability to come to a school, or, I mean, look, the idea that Shapiro, whatever you guys disagree | ||
| with him about is fine, the idea that he's a controversial speaker is completely bananas. | ||
| Shapiro probably, I would guess, agrees with policies of Ronald Reagan probably 99%. | ||
| Now, you may not like some of those policies, that's fine, but the point is that it was | ||
| mainstream conservative thought only 25, 30 years ago, something like that. | ||
| But they know that if they dare step up and fight the monster, well, the monster will | ||
| come for them. | ||
| So, that also goes back to why I know that Bernie will eventually be eaten by this thing. | ||
| It's a constant movement of destruction. | ||
| It's not about creation. | ||
| There was a video, I'm sure some of you guys saw this, I spoke at the University of New | ||
| Hampshire, it has a couple million views, and before the event, right before the end, | ||
| about an hour before, they said, "We can't secure a room on campus." | ||
| Apparently I'm so controversial that they could not secure a room. | ||
| So they had to take it off site. | ||
| So we had, I don't know, maybe 400 students there or so. | ||
| And it was sold out for the size of that room. | ||
| It was 400 people in a 400 person room. | ||
| There were more people that wanted to get in that couldn't get in. | ||
| But then they said we can't secure the room, so they moved us to the local hockey rink, which sat 10,000 people. | ||
| So I spoke for 400 people in a 10,000-seat arena, which is extremely bizarre. | ||
| But I don't bring that up because I'm talking about the numbers as much as they already said we lost. | ||
| If a university says we cannot even secure our own campus, they have already lost. | ||
| And then the protesters come in and they scream that I'm not for free speech or I'm a bigot and a Nazi and the rest of it. | ||
| One of the girls kept calling me a homophobe, which my husband has no idea. | ||
| [laughter] | ||
| You know, it's like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
[applause] | |
| And, you know, the best part of that one, and if you haven't seen this, it's on YouTube. | ||
| Just search Dave Rubin, New Hampshire, or something. | ||
| There was a woman in the back screaming at me that I hate trans people. | ||
| She kept saying I hate trans people, so I said, I just want to be very clear about my feelings towards trans people. | ||
| I want them to be treated with the exact same dignity and respect and the exact same laws. | ||
| Under the same laws that everyone else has to be. | ||
| I said specifically to her, I made sure to look at her, I said, I hope that you have someone that you love in your life and you've found happiness in all of these things. | ||
| And then she called me Hitler and a Nazi and all that, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But the best part of this, I did not know this till weeks later, it turns out that she was a gender studies professor at the university. | ||
| I mean, really, when you think about how deeply corrupt, so you have a faculty member of a | ||
| really made up, you know, it's not a real set of ideas, right? | ||
| But it could have just as easily been an economics professor or whatever else. | ||
| The idea that they are literally there shouting down speakers and, you know, I don't want you guys to mob her or anyone else watching this to mob her. | ||
| It doesn't even matter. | ||
| It would be nice, I suppose, if the students of the school did something. | ||
| But that she felt empowered enough, because of her place in the intersectional scale, that she knew she could go to an event, scream down to a speaker, try to silence a speaker, and know that she'd have complete impunity. | ||
| And no matter what I said, I mean that's the other thing, I offered her every piece of goodness that I had to say, I don't know what our differences are exactly, but I certainly don't hate you, and I don't hate, I certainly don't hate anyone because of their identity. | ||
| So you've had a tremendous journey to get to where you are. | ||
| Where are you heading next? | ||
| I mean, do you see yourself cranking out a lot more content when it comes to the Rubin Report? | ||
| an election year, and we ain't seen nothing yet. | ||
| So you've had a tremendous journey to get to where you are. | ||
| Where are you heading next? | ||
| I mean, do you see yourself cranking out a lot more content when it comes to the Rubin Report? | ||
| Do you see yourself only doing it for a couple more years and going to do something? | ||
| I mean, what's next for you? | ||
| Well, I'm pretty sure-- | ||
| well, I mean, there's a couple of things. | ||
| So I actually don't think I should be doing more content, because I think there's enough out there. | ||
| You know, like, I want people to still get laid. | ||
| Does anyone here get laid? | ||
|
unidentified
|
One guy, OK, very good. | |
| You know, my belief is, you know, look, I love this stuff. | ||
| I love this. | ||
| I love talking about ideas. | ||
| I love being in front of crowds. | ||
| I like engaging with people about ideas. | ||
| But my feeling is that if I do, you know, a couple shows per week, we usually do about two hour-long interviews per week, I assume that if you listen to one of my shows, you probably maybe listen to a little bit of Sam Harris, a little bit of Rogan, a little bit of Shapiro, Peterson, blah, blah. | ||
| If you give five or ten of your hours a week to some of this stuff, like, that's great. | ||
| And I don't think we need that much more. | ||
| The people that are glued to this all the time, I actually think that's starting to become a problem because there's a whole other world out there. | ||
| You should know about these, the issues that I think we've been talking about up here because they're important. | ||
| But, but you shouldn't let it completely take over your life. | ||
| I think, in a weird way, that's what's happened with the left, because they, they believe that politics is everything. | ||
| They, they think that they can fix everything through politics. | ||
| And ironically, I think most people in this room, and certainly I, I, I believe that politics is the problem. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's the, that's the inherent problem that we have. | ||
| I would rather get to a place where the government's small enough that it can't affect us that, that much. | ||
| So I, that's the idea that I want to push out there. | ||
| More than anything else. | ||
| So we'll keep doing this. | ||
| We just signed this great distribution deal with The Blaze. | ||
| I've got my book coming out. | ||
| And we just announced, because I didn't want to have the government regulate YouTube, I started a tech company. | ||
| And we've built a really awesome app for creators that'll help them write their own terms of service and natively upload video. | ||
| and communicate with their audience. | ||
| We're going into beta testing next week. | ||
| So we're going to build-- | ||
| I thought, I can't solve the problem for everybody. | ||
| But I can-- thank you, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
[APPLAUSE] | |
| So what we did was we built an app that basically we're starting with My Community, and we're | ||
| going to secure My Community. | ||
| And it'll be, if you're a member of the Rubin Report app, you'll be able to communicate with each other. | ||
| You'll be able to communicate with me. | ||
| I can live stream in there. | ||
| We've got different payment processors, all of those things. | ||
| As I said, native upload video, so we're not dependent on YouTube. | ||
| It doesn't solve all of the problems. | ||
| But then we can give that app to all sorts of other creators, | ||
| whether it's political people or whatever else, unboxers. | ||
| I don't know what people are doing on YouTube, whatever the hell they're doing on there. | ||
| But anyone can be part of this. | ||
| And if you want to secure your community and have terms of service that works for your community-- | ||
| and guess what? | ||
| You're also going to kill 99% of the relentless awful trolls, | ||
| because trolls don't pay you to troll you. | ||
| So even if you charge $0.25 a month, you'll eliminate most of that. | ||
| And then if they want to pay you to do it, you either suck it up and it just increases | ||
| your monthly income, or you just say, all right, you're gone. | ||
| You're out of here. | ||
| I don't want your money. | ||
| And then you're not infringing on anyone's free speech because it's not a platform. | ||
| My feeling is that the day of the platforms is over. | ||
| The internet had a great run for twenty years. | ||
| And I think we're starting to watch it implode right now. | ||
| It's kind of eating itself, the way everything is on Twitter where they cannot, you know, how can you, you can have, we're going to ban Alex Jones, but you can have Hamas. | ||
| We're going to take Louis Farrakhan's blue check away, but you can have this. | ||
| Like none of it makes any sense. | ||
| They don't even want it to make sense because they just want to keep us in constant chaos. | ||
| So my feeling was if I could solve my problem, that would be the beginning. | ||
| And that's, that's what we're doing. | ||
| Oh, but as far as how long I'll do all this. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I truly don't know. | ||
| I mean, after 33 days away, there was something nice about not being in the fray as much as I love this. | ||
| But, you know, we've got real problems, and I think I've offered a little bit of a chance to solve some of those problems. | ||
| So I'm not going anywhere yet. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| I like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I want to end... Oh, I will say this, though. | |
| When I go, it's going to be one tweet. | ||
| Who is John Galt? | ||
| And then I am gone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, that is it. | |
| I will disappear. | ||
| So, we've got 400 students here. | ||
| We're at Yale Con Austin. | ||
| You know, I've appreciated you letting me flip the script and interview you. | ||
| What's one piece of advice, maybe a lesson or something for all these folks in this room that want to get these ideas, they want them to go mainstream. | ||
| I think earlier your quip about, you know, you got to focus on what you're good at. | ||
| I think that's great. | ||
| Is there something you would say is kind of a send-off? | ||
| To get them, I don't want to say motivated, but just something you could share. | ||
| Don't be afraid to be proud of the fact that we truly live in the greatest country in the history of the United States. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When you say history of the United States... In the history of the United States, Jesus. | |
| I've been traveling a lot, people. | ||
| I just got back on the grid. | ||
| In the history of the world. | ||
| in the history of the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
[applause] | |
| To be clear, I am talking about the United States. | ||
| [laughter] | ||
| (laughs) | ||
| This is the greatest country that the world has ever seen. | ||
| More people from more corners of the earth, literally every place on earth, have come to America, still want to come to America. | ||
| Nobody leaves. | ||
| Nobody leaves. | ||
| Lena Dunham is still here. | ||
| You know, Debra Messing ain't going anywhere. | ||
| They never leave. | ||
| Everyone wants to come here, right? | ||
| We don't stop people from leaving. | ||
| So the same people that, you know, it's like the left will scream about open borders and then also tell you what an evil, horrible place it is. | ||
| So it's like, you want everyone to just share in the horror? | ||
| What are we really talking about here? | ||
| But the point is that understand that the only privilege that you have in this room is that you're privileged to live in the United States. | ||
| That is the truth. | ||
| Think about your grandparents. | ||
| Everyone in this room, for one second, think about your grandparents. | ||
| I guarantee you, I guarantee you for 99.9% of the people in this room, your life is better | ||
| than your grandparents' life. | ||
| And that is what the United States has afforded everyone regardless of race or religion or | ||
| creed or any of that nonsense. | ||
| Nobody cares about that stuff. | ||
| We have been tricked into thinking that everyone is walking around with these evil, racist, | ||
| xenophobic views. | ||
| It is simply not the case. | ||
| Most people don't care about it. | ||
| It is being mainstreamed by the group of people who do care about it. | ||
| And ironically, that's the people that call you bigots, but you are not bigots and fight | ||
| to keep this thing going. | ||
| You know, you always see this thing in the media, how the United States under Trump, | ||
| Nobody respects the United States anymore. | ||
| Nobody respects the United States. | ||
| I did 15 European countries with Jordan in every stop that we did. | ||
| Now, I get it. | ||
| It's a bit of a select audience at our shows. | ||
| But in every stop that we went to, people still wanted the United States to be that shining beacon. | ||
| Our First Amendment? | ||
| They think it is the greatest thing ever, so don't give it up because, by the way, it's getting pushed towards the paper shredder. | ||
| Don't, you know, keep fighting for these things and because if you don't, don't, well here it is more than anything else, don't think anyone else is going to do it for you. | ||
| That really is the simple way to say it. | ||
| No one else is going to do it for you, so do it. | ||
| Do it yourself and you'll feel better. | ||
| You will feel better and more accomplished and more honest and decent, really. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, big round of applause, Mr. Dave Rubin. | ||
| Thank you guys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nice man, that was really fun. | |
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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