Jan. 19, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:01:11
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| When we started getting all that money funneling into the country after the end of World War II, and the Social Democrats were like, look at us, how good socialism is working. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And it had nothing to do with them. | ||
| In fact, their policies, big government policies, wasted all that money. | ||
| And, you know, in the 1990s, we actually had to devaluate our currency against 30% of everything was lost because of the welfare state they built up. | ||
| This is the Rubin Report and I'm once again, Dave Rubin. | ||
| Here's a friendly reminder to subscribe to our channel by clicking that pesky bell and turning on notifications so that you might, just might see our videos. | ||
| And more importantly, joining me today are two Swedish podcast superstars and free speech activists in no order, Aaron Flam and Henrik Jonsson. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you for having us. | ||
| I am glad to have you guys. | ||
| We have sat down before Yes, a couple of years ago. | ||
| A couple of years ago. | ||
| Before I do anything else, did I give proper Swedish pronunciation of the names there? | ||
| That was a very American version of both of your names. | ||
|
unidentified
|
10 out of 10. | |
| Yeah? | ||
| I'm fine with however you say my name. | ||
| I said Aaron Flam. | ||
| Henrik Jönsson. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Jönsson. | ||
| So I purposely did that. | ||
| So if you were saying Aaron Flam in perfect Swedish, how would you say it? | ||
| Aaron Flam. | ||
| Okay, there we go. | ||
| And I said Henrik Jönsson, but I knew it was a little more off with you. | ||
| Yeah, Henrik Jönsson. | ||
| That's the way you say it in Swedish. | ||
| Henrik Jönsson. | ||
| Jönsson. | ||
| But you know, I lived in London for 10 years, so I almost changed my name to Jönsson because the nightmare of explaining this bizarre pronunciation. | ||
| And also the O with two dots on top of it. | ||
| There's O with two And I knew that the J was really a Y in our world, but I wanted you to say it first, so it sounded a little smoother. | ||
| Anyway, I'm thrilled to have you guys here. | ||
| I'll preface all of this by saying something that I told you guys earlier in the week when I did both of your podcasts, which is that, bizarrely, almost impossibly, our fifth most watched country for this show, The Rubin Report, is Sweden, so it's the United States first, | ||
| and then usually Canada and the UK battle out two and three, and then Australia is four, and then Sweden. | ||
| Even though we only have 10 million people. | ||
| I have half the population of Sweden in this room right now. | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| And somehow, whatever it is that we're talking about here, related to free speech and the rest of it, | ||
| has really hit a nerve in Sweden. | ||
| I also think it's partly because I had you on, and that show really just exploded. | ||
| I've since done a couple shows in Sweden with Jordan Peterson. | ||
| So before we do anything else, and I'll go to you first, just tell my audience a little bit about yourself. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do and all that good stuff, | ||
| and then we'll recap with you, and then we'll take it from there. | ||
| Well, my background, I'm really a businessman. | ||
| I'm an IT entrepreneur. | ||
| I built a number of companies over the years. | ||
| But about two years ago, I recorded a small YouTube video, well, actually a Facebook video on my phone, where I, out of spite, I was irritated with the journalistic, journalist establishments incapacity of correctly describing The difference between dividends and a profit in a private company, because we had this big debate about how we didn't want commercial companies in the health care sector. | ||
| So I made a video where I said, OK, listen, guys, if you want to talk about this, you need to understand the difference between those two different things. | ||
| And I'm going to tell you all. | ||
| So I posted it on Facebook the morning after I woke up. | ||
| My mailbox was overflowing and had so many people just going, wow, you're so good at explaining this stuff. | ||
| Nobody ever talks about this. | ||
| And then I started making videos. | ||
| Now I run the largest politically minded YouTube channel in Sweden. | ||
| Should I ask what level of hate you got just by putting out a video about dividends and health insurance and the market? | ||
| Well, you know, that was a sort of neutral video because it was on taxation, but let's put it this way. | ||
| Taxation often is not neutral, at least in this country. | ||
| Oh, and maybe it's a little more neutral for you guys because you've been numbed into it or something like that. | ||
| Well, taxation is like air for us. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But did you get a lot of haters? | ||
| I guess you didn't. | ||
| Initially, very little. | ||
| Because the situation we have back home is like, the left does not follow people like me. | ||
| Because I have a business background, they think, well, he's a capitalist pig, so let's not listen to this guy. | ||
| But as my channel grew, and now I have about 600,000 people a month watching my videos, which is more than most of the national newspapers have, | ||
| so then I become a problem. | ||
| So now I'm getting quite a bit of flack. | ||
| Just being on your show is probably gonna push a few people's buttons. | ||
| We're gonna quadruple your flack by the end of today. | ||
| Aaron, obviously I know a little more about your story, but for the people that did not see our first interview. | ||
| Well, they should know because they should have watched every episode of your show. | ||
| I assume most of them have. | ||
| I'm a Swedish comedian, and then after a while I realized I can't do my jokes anymore, my beautifully constructed child pornography jokes, and then I had to... Well, we don't exactly have free speech in Sweden, we got it in 94 from the EU, and that's sort of... | ||
| But I would like to have some in Sweden. | ||
| So I've been working at that since last we met. | ||
| And since we met last, I've been doing very little comedy, although I have done some comedy. | ||
| You did some stand-up in L.A. | ||
| just a couple days ago. | ||
| Yes, at the L.A. | ||
| Improv, and it went quite well. | ||
| They loved my abortion jokes. | ||
| And then, since last we met, because at the point when we met, I wanted to find the root cause of the craziness that is going on in the Western world right now. | ||
| And you've written a book about it, and I just finished and published my book about it. | ||
| Unfortunately in Swedish, but I'll get you an English version. | ||
| I'm gonna read the English version because not only do I not speak Swedish, | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| but your book, we should have had it on the table here, I'll have my guys grab it. | ||
| It's about how many pages? | ||
| Almost 500 pages, right? | ||
| And this thing is dense. | ||
| I mean, if you whacked somebody with this thing, it's like a brick. | ||
| Yes, I want everything I do to be able to be used in multiple ways. | ||
| (both laughing) | ||
| But no, it's called "This is a Swedish Tiger" | ||
| and basically, I got proof that the socialists and the Islamists have pretty much been working together | ||
| since the end of World War II and that the socialists didn't turn in '43, | ||
| but they were on Hitler's side until the end. | ||
| And after the war, they sort of swept that under the carpet, found alliances, because the Islamists, or what turned, morphed into the Islamists, were on Hitler's side as well, and they continued that alliance, and I think we're seeing the end point of that cooperation now. | ||
| So it's a comedy? | ||
| Well, it's a very dark comedy. | ||
| Yeah, exactly, like almost everything these days. | ||
| So, you start doing video... Did you start doing video first? | ||
| Video right away. | ||
| So you start doing the video, and just by talking about these things, my sense from what's going on in Sweden is that there's just a lot of people due to cultural reasons that hopefully you guys can explain, just don't really say what they're thinking enough. | ||
| And then it makes guys like you very unique. | ||
| A comedian, it's one thing to be doing it, but a guy from a business background, were you shocked at what was happening? | ||
| Yes, yes I was. | ||
| Listen, I think part of the reason that your show is popular in Sweden is our nation is like the canary in the coal mine, and people are like so penned up Because we have a fiercely egalitarian culture. | ||
| It's very conformist. | ||
| So it's incredibly threatening to break the mold. | ||
| But there is this pent-up need of seriously engaging in open conversation about a lot of issues that are, well, they put the lid on those. | ||
| And I think that's what you were picking up on when you went there. | ||
| And I think that is why, once I started making my videos, it just exploded. | ||
| Because there were so many people, wow, how do you dare say these things? | ||
| What were the first couple type of things that you were talking about? | ||
| Well, here's where Aaron and I kind of connect, because I wanted to debunk the idea that the social democratic rule, which has been running Sweden for the better part of the last 100 years, they took credit for the financial miracle that we had. | ||
| Basically, Sweden rose from a rather poor agrarian economy into the per capita wealthiest country on Earth. | ||
| Over a couple of decades. | ||
| But that was mainly due, and if you ask economists, they will know this, but nobody speaks about it. | ||
| The reason that happened was because we did not take a stand against the Nazis in the war. | ||
| So we actually sold them iron ore and granite. | ||
| And after the war, we were also the only intact industrialized manufacturing nation in Europe. | ||
| So we exported everything to everyone, and that's how we became rich. | ||
| So you were acting like capitalists sort of on the DL, on the down low, but in effect... I'd say no, that's the worst brand of crony capitalism I would say. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What about you? | ||
| So you were doing stand-up first, but what were the issues first that you were talking about that you realized shouldn't be talked about? | ||
| Well, as a comedian, I know what cultural taboos we have, so I just made a list and, you know, started doing jokes on every cultural taboo because that was my job. | ||
| So I went through, you know, the usual shock thing, you can always do a pedophilia joke because, you know, or a fisting joke, it's funny. | ||
| But then I started drugs, marijuana. | ||
| Aaron, this is a family show. | ||
| And then I went to marijuana. | ||
| But I've never experienced as much hate as when I started my campaign to crush socialism. | ||
| Because in their minds, that's just the most taboo thing you could ever say. | ||
| That's the entire system. | ||
| You're basically shitting where you eat. | ||
| So when you say you don't have free speech, Well, you are free to say whatever you want as long as no one takes offense or gets insulted. | ||
| Because what's gonna happen if someone takes offense or gets insulted? | ||
| Because we're now, we seem to be importing this idea now. | ||
| Yes, because then their feelings are hurt. | ||
| And if you want to have a socialist welfare state, everyone has to be like cogs in the wheel. | ||
| So that's why you need conformism and collectivism and a culture of silence. | ||
| And that is why they get so annoyed when he speaks out, because he's breaking the culture of silence. | ||
| And cultures of silence are about maintaining the real. | ||
| Because as long as everyone has the same lie, then that's reality. | ||
| But if someone says, wait a minute, this might not be exactly the case. | ||
| Like, for instance, Henrik got burglarized in Malmö, where he lives. | ||
| I don't know if he told you that story. | ||
| Yes, I do want to talk about that. | ||
| Yeah, and then when he talks about that, he breaks the culture of silence, that Sweden is peaceful, it is ordered, everything works, no one needs a gun for self-defense because the police or the state will take care of everything. | ||
| And remarkably enough, that's the reason why my book, by the way, is called This is a Swedish Tiger, because tiger in Swedish means both the apex predator and shut up. | ||
| So during the Second World War, there was a campaign in Sweden launched by the government that said, be a Swedish tiger, which means be silent but deadly. | ||
| It's a very clever and very Orwellian campaign. | ||
| Yeah, that is extremely Orwellian. | ||
| I'd like to add two things to what you just said. | ||
| I mean, formally, you're allowed to say anything you want in Sweden. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the consequences of doing so can be very, very severe. | ||
| People will hate you, and they will sometimes go after your employer. | ||
| They will try to make it impossible for you to work. | ||
| So it is a culture of silence, and it's very aggressive, but we never speak of it. | ||
| The other thing, which is what a culture of silence is. | ||
| Don't mention the culture of silence. | ||
| But was it necessary there? | ||
| Also, we are doing this. | ||
| But the second thing that I think is important to mention there is like, like the establishment media of Sweden and sort of, you know, the news organizations and so forth. | ||
| They have been losing a lot of their revenue to, you know, the digital tech giants like Google and Facebook and so forth and very unhappy about that. | ||
| So they've been pushing The government to intervene with what they're doing under the guise of, well, you know, it's promoting extremism or whatever. | ||
| People are writing nasty things on Facebook. | ||
| And they pushed it all the way to the top government. | ||
| So the Minister of Justice actually had a meeting with Google and Facebook. | ||
| You can read this in the papers. | ||
| I can send you links for this. | ||
| Where he actually told them, well, of course there's freedom of speech. | ||
| And it's great that your private companies And private companies make their own decisions. | ||
| Is that sort of putting like a virtual gun against your back? | ||
| You're private for now. | ||
| But we think you should clean up some of the stuff on your platforms. | ||
| Otherwise, we might have to move forward with regulation. | ||
| Now, I wouldn't want to be, you know, the president of Facebook Sweden having to answer to an American CEO, you know, tell them that I'm the guy that made him regulate our company. | ||
| So. | ||
| So. | ||
| What type of slurs have been thrown at you guys? | ||
| Because that seems to be what has boiled down to. | ||
| You haven't been dragged off to jail, right? | ||
| So when we talk about free speech, they haven't jailed you yet. | ||
| But what type of slurs are they throwing at you to make sure that it perhaps hampers some of your businesses or hampers your ability to perform at clubs? | ||
| Five or six days ago, they called us whores. | ||
| Venmo whores. | ||
| Venmo whores. | ||
| Who's they in this case? | ||
| Well, that would be... This was actually a text written by a rather famous establishment journalist in one of the biggest national papers, who had a big issue... So, in effect, he works for a state-run paper, but because... No, no, no. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| So, they call these papers and media outlets free media, but they're all on the take, as you would call it, or subsidized, as we would call it. | ||
| This guy was actually on Swedish radio, so I have the recording downloaded where he... Yeah, that's state radio actually. | ||
| So in effect though, someone on state radio, so he's funded by the state to get his message out there, called you guys, independent people, putting stuff up on YouTube. | ||
| He likened us to prostitutes. | ||
| You guys are Venmo hoarders. | ||
| This is Grifter. | ||
| This is the one that gets thrown at us in America all the time. | ||
| It's like if I was grifting, I would be doing the other thing. | ||
| If we were grifters, what would be the easiest thing to do? | ||
| Work for NPR? | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| Work for NPR, buy into socialism, buy into intersectionality. | ||
| And that's what they want from you. | ||
| They want to turn you into us. | ||
| As I told you last time, we want you to assimilate. | ||
| Okay, so that's exactly where I wanted to go with this, because if you listen to our Socialist Democrats or Democratic Socialists or whatever the hell they are these days, I keep saying they're gonna drop the Democrat part soon enough, what they always say is, we should be more like Sweden. | ||
| AOC says this, Bernie says this, I doubt that AOC has ever been to Sweden. | ||
| Perhaps Bernie has been to Sweden. | ||
| But they say the Nordic countries usually, but it's specifically we should be more like Sweden. | ||
| Now you guys have 10 million people, we have 350 million people, we have people from every walk of life, from every corner of the earth, you guys mainly were a homogenous society into the last couple years. | ||
| There's all sorts of reasons that that analogy doesn't quite make sense. | ||
| But when you hear that, America should be more like Sweden, what is that? | ||
| Nothing pushes my buttons. | ||
| Let's clear this up once and for all. | ||
| Sweden was never a socialist country in the sense that the Eastern Bloc was, you know, Soviet Union and so forth. | ||
| When Sweden became wealthy, This was during the last part of the 1800s. | ||
| We had a bunch of laissez-faire reforms done. | ||
| So that's when we started the transformation to industrialize. | ||
| We were actually quite late to the game. | ||
| It was these, you know, free market reforms. | ||
| So when you got the government out, laissez-faire, suddenly the economy starts booming, okay? | ||
| Johan August Gripenstedt is the name of the guy that was very forward thinking, that made these reforms possible. | ||
| And then things started getting better after that. | ||
| The other thing you need to remember is that when we started getting all that money funneling into the country after the end of World War II, and the Social Democrats were like, look at us, how good socialism is working. | ||
| And it had nothing to do with them. | ||
| In fact, their policies, big government policies, Wasted all that money and you know in the 1990s we actually had to devaluate our currency. | ||
| 30% of everything was lost because of the welfare state they built up. | ||
| So if you hear Bernie Sanders or Warren say stuff like we need to be more like Sweden, well the part they're missing is that what was good about Sweden was free market oriented. | ||
| What was bad about Sweden, we turned out into a decent country in spite of socialism, not because of. | ||
| Can you add to that? | ||
| I can confirm that is true and you can look it up. | ||
| It's factual. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when you guys hear that and doing what you are doing, I mean, it just makes your head spin. | ||
| Sort of feel like you're going to smack somebody. | ||
| Well, I love my job. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| Because I get to piss people off, and I believe what Larry David once said, that if you have the opportunity to annoy someone, you should take it. | ||
| Well, you are doing that. | ||
| You're doing just fine. | ||
| But do you think part of the issue here is that the extent The exterior of Sweden looks a certain way. | ||
| So for example, I had two trips to Sweden, to Stockholm, and I was only in Stockholm. | ||
| So what I'm seeing is a very snapshot version. | ||
| But just from walking around Stockholm, or maybe what we see in the media, or in the movies, if they show someone from Sweden, they're always very tall, they look very good, they're blonde like you, and they're in nice jackets. | ||
| And what I noticed from walking around Stockholm was it looked like everyone bought their clothes that morning. | ||
| Everyone looked fantastic. | ||
| Everything was clean. | ||
| The streets were clean. | ||
| All those things. | ||
| Now, I get it. | ||
| It's a very small little micro version of this. | ||
| But is that part of the problem? | ||
| That the veneer of this somehow is still selling well? | ||
| Or something like that? | ||
| Outside of... | ||
| Your borders? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I think it's sort of a Potemkin village, if you know what that is. | ||
| It's a backdrop, and behind it, well, it reminds me of Hollywood that way. | ||
| Yeah, you're in the right town. | ||
| Yeah, if you look at it in front, it looks good, but if you look behind the curtain, but you don't hide your homeless. | ||
| We would hide them. | ||
| Now we can't afford to hide them anymore. | ||
| Well, we can't hide them anymore because you're here in California where they're Pretty much everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, I have noticed. | ||
| But I think, just like not speaking out against things you might see as wrong or incorrect, it is very important that everything looks good if you are to have a culture of silence and a quasi-socialist state. | ||
| How are you guys able to gauge how much effect you're actually having on the average Swede? | ||
| I'd say, judging by the reactions we're getting from our enemies, things are going very well. | ||
| They get very upset. | ||
| Funnily enough, like the extreme left people, they usually do not touch me. | ||
| It is the social liberals who are, you know, supposed to be like center-right. | ||
| Can you explain a little bit what the differentiation there is for an American perspective? | ||
| Because I think Americans hear that, the social liberals and the far left, that sounds sort of like the same thing. | ||
| Of course, yes. | ||
| Liberal here means a lefty, whereas in Europe, the word liberal is moving that direction in Europe as well. | ||
| But it still means more like the classical Austrian liberalism. | ||
| I'm a European liberal. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Perfect. | |
| Yeah, me too. | ||
| That's I would use the word, you know. | ||
| Fiscally conservative, but socially liberal to describe myself. | ||
| So that's where most of the attacks are coming from on my end, you know, from journalists, you know, people of platform, establishment media platforms, they will be very upset and they will find a single word that they don't like in a sentence, pull it out and start a tweet storm, you know. | ||
| They will tell you things like, Well, you're dangerous, you're a populistic alarmist. | ||
| You're not taking responsibility for what kind of people you take on to your show. | ||
| And you know, going back to this thing with the canary in the coal mine. | ||
| This is the thing, because what all of these people have been doing is working so very hard at guiding the population to the correct moral standpoint at the end of whatever they produce. | ||
| And when you don't do that, you bring somebody else on the show and say, OK, this is a completely different perspective, and I'm not going to attack you. | ||
| I don't want to fight you. | ||
| I want to explore your idea and just see what I make of it. | ||
| They hate it. | ||
| They do not want it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is there anyone politically that is echoing some of your sentiments about what's happening in Sweden? | ||
| Well, Hanif Bali does the job from time to time when his party doesn't try to rein him in. | ||
| Which party is he part of? | ||
| He's part of the moderate party. | ||
| Which is right wing. | ||
| That would be, by American standards, that would be like Ultra leftists. | ||
| Well, what type of policies would they have? | ||
| Just because I'm trying to get the math. | ||
| Lower taxes, more personal responsibility and individual choice. | ||
| They're trying to get it in there. | ||
| So it would basically be a conservative or libertarian. | ||
| Light version of the conservatives. | ||
| I think they call themselves liberal conservatives. | ||
| Liberal conservatives. | ||
| That jives with me, I suppose. | ||
| So I told you guys that when I was in Stockholm for the two shows with Jordan Peterson, and I saw you there, that they really stuck out. | ||
| Well, first off, I was particularly excited about them because I knew that this small country was my fifth most watched country, and I was like, what the hell's going on here? | ||
| And Jordan also knew that a huge percentage of his viewership was from there. | ||
| So we both sort of had that date, that first Stockholm date in our minds as something special's happening. | ||
| The shows were incredible. | ||
| The first show sold out literally in a minute, which is why we added the second show. | ||
| The audiences were phenomenal, correct me if I'm wrong. | ||
| You were so popular, there was a black market trading in tickets to your shows. | ||
| I would like to say that it was Jordan that was very popular, so just for the record. | ||
| The thing that truly struck me was that after the show we would do our meet and greets and Jordan would meet with hundreds of people. | ||
| Mine, we would just quickly sell them basically right before the show so I'd usually get, you know, 30 or 40 people because we have to do it very quick. | ||
| But at the two Stockholm shows we had about 80 or 100 people. | ||
| We jammed all of these people into a small room. | ||
| We're sitting there and it felt like something memorable to me. | ||
| It felt like everyone in that room- They had prepared questions for you. | ||
| Not Jordan, they had prepared for you. | ||
| Everyone in that room had something written down or something on their phone or something they wanted to hand to me or a book that I should read or a story or something. | ||
| And it was so moving to me that I think I said to you, is there a bar around here we can go to? | ||
| And we took everybody and we went to a bar and we hung out for hours. | ||
| Until they closed. | ||
| Until they closed, they kicked us out. | ||
| And I met some of the Swedish intellectuals that you guys hang out with and all these people. | ||
| Anyway, I'm not even asking a question here. | ||
| Suffice to say that it was so obvious to me that something is going on there. | ||
| It was truly moving. | ||
| Apart from having a disproportionate amount of viewers for such a small country of your show and Jordan's videos, well, you caused quite a splash. | ||
| Our Minister of Foreign Affairs went out publicly and said Jordan Peterson is a bug and should crawl back under the rock he came from. | ||
| Yes, which I was able to quote her at the beginning of the show and it got quite a laugh. | ||
| Everyone basically screamed the end of the joke before I said it. | ||
| Well, yes, she just retired, thank God. | ||
| You can't buy PR like that. | ||
| Yeah, but what do you make of that sort of thing? | ||
| So when you know the ideas that Jordan sets forth. | ||
| So let me just explain. | ||
| Our Minister of Foreign Affairs, she goes to Iran. | ||
| She goes to all these places and does business as one should with dictators or whatever or not. | ||
| So she meets truly horrible people. | ||
| in her work. | ||
| Even worse than Jordan Peterson. | ||
| And that's what's so funny. | ||
| I mean this is just a Canadian professor of psychology who tells people to make their beds in the morning. | ||
| And she's never voiced anything negative about the Iranian regime. | ||
| So it's quite You know it's funny, or not funny, I suppose depressing at a certain level that she said that after our first show. | ||
| So then I think we had a day or two away. | ||
| I think maybe we were in Copenhagen or somewhere else. | ||
| And I remember thinking when we were coming back... | ||
| That, you know, we're going through security again, we're going through the border again, and I remember thinking, you know, we just saw this story, I think we saw it on the plane, what the foreign minister said, and I thought, why wouldn't they stop us at the border or harass him or whatever? | ||
| Now, they didn't, but that sort of thing, it's like we can sort of joke about it now and it sounds so ridiculous, but there is another human element to it that But you came in, and just coming in is breaking a culture of silence, so they have to do something. | ||
| They have to tell their listeners, don't listen to these guys. | ||
| They are here to destroy us, you know? | ||
| I mean, the story you're telling about how all these people had written down questions for you, To me that's actually, it's so, it's a beautiful thing that it almost brings tears to my eyes. | ||
| No, it literally almost brought tears to my eyes that night. | ||
| Because, you know, I get all these emails from like young guys who want to, you know, begin exploring their lives and they are thirsty for, you know, an open discussion. | ||
| The fact that Margot Wallström, the minister that told Jordan to crawl under a rock, that is like the perfect example of the culture of silence that we have. | ||
| Because the fact that he just showed up in Sweden, they had to make a stand that what this man is saying is not part of the narrative that we want here. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Can you talk about how this is related to sort of how men are treated or at least talked about in Sweden? | ||
| Because you guys have the first supposedly self-proclaimed feminist government, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| As you can tell, when they visited Iran, they all wore niqabs, so very feminist indeed. | ||
| Yeah, very feminist indeed. | ||
| But the reason I mention that is because, as I said earlier, I did both of your podcasts, which we'll link to below because I want people to see you guys as hosts, but I mentioned the story to both of you of how the day of the Stockholm show, | ||
| it was cold out and I wanted to get a hat. | ||
| And I went into H&M, which is your, is that your greatest, well H&M-- | ||
| It's like Gap here. | ||
| Are your greatest exports. | ||
| And I went into H&M and I was online to buy the hat. | ||
| And I see the guy in front of me, young guy, probably 20, 21 years old, | ||
| says to the cashier, "This is the first suit I've ever bought." | ||
| He was speaking in English. | ||
| He said, the first suit I've ever bought and I'm going to see this Jordan Peterson show tonight. | ||
| And then the cashier says, I'm going to see the Jordan Peterson show tonight. | ||
| So I tapped the guy on the shoulder. | ||
| I turned around and said, I'm going to see the Jordan Peterson show. | ||
| And he knew who I was. | ||
| And I just thought it was such an incredible moment. | ||
| Like this young kid who literally was buying the first suit of his life to, as you just said, listen to a Canadian psychology professor, tell him to sit up straight with his shoulders back. | ||
| So can you talk a little bit about what's happening with either young people or men or both or some combination? | ||
| There's a problem with language because what I think they're trying to do in Sweden, have been trying for my entire life, is they're trying to accomplish gender equity. | ||
| And that's not the same thing as equality of the sexes, right? | ||
| Because you guys have equality of the sexes. | ||
| In many senses, right? | ||
| Well, that depends on what you mean with equality. | ||
| Men and women have the same opportunities. | ||
| In some cases, women even have more opportunities economically when it comes to subsidies for being pregnant, for instance, or taking maternity leave. | ||
| The results of the free choices that women make are, though, considered a problem. | ||
| Yes, right. | ||
| So this is the interesting way. | ||
| But just to be clear, though, because what part of what I said did not make sense. | ||
| No, no, no, but when you go for gender equity, what you want is, well, you want a facade, right? | ||
| You want 50-50%. | ||
| 50 percent here and 50 percent there, men and women. | ||
| It doesn't matter if they're competent, if they want to work there. | ||
| And we have government bodies regulating this and trying to—and we do this from kindergarten and upwards. | ||
| We encourage the girls to take up more space and be less like girls, and we encourage the boys to, you know, close inwards and not take up as much space. | ||
| So, basically, what they're trying to do is they're trying to make these kids go against their biology or whatever they feel is right, because they want it to look perfect. | ||
| So to be clear, it's not just- And equal, or equitous. | ||
| Right, it's not just, you know, you should act this way, but it ends up working into what jobs they choose, because Jordan mentioned this several times there, and a lot of people talk about this, that because you guys have had equality for so long, meaning you could do whatever you want as a man or a woman, it turned out that yes, women tend to be nurses more | ||
| and men turn out to be engineers more because women generally are more interested in people | ||
| and men happen to be more interested in things. | ||
| That's just the nature of reality. | ||
| The gender paradox. | ||
| I think this is what you were getting to. | ||
| The social justice warriors don't like that experiment. | ||
| They don't like the experiment of freedom. | ||
| Jordan was on a talk show host in Sweden, on a talk show in Sweden | ||
| where he was addressing this very topic. | ||
| And he basically said, well, you know, science supports that this is the way it happens | ||
| in a free country where people can choose. | ||
| And we had like one of the top level politicians there and she was like, well, I don't agree with that. | ||
| I actually made an episode on my show about that because this man just said, science says this, I don't agree with it. | ||
| Okay, so what are we now, mystics? | ||
| So that thing though, so the politician says that, I don't agree with it. | ||
| I don't agree with what science says. | ||
| I don't agree with what biology says. | ||
| We all know that men or women are different. | ||
| It doesn't make either sex better than the other. | ||
| It's just an is. | ||
| But when you hear that response, you think most people just swallow that and take it. | ||
| I think most people do that because we're a fiercely egalitarian, very conformist people. | ||
| So they have been trained for very long to just accept that form of communication. | ||
| Now we have a government body, the Ministry of Equality. | ||
| And I mean, just the name sounds like so totalitarian, I can't, you know, it's like... 1984, man. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And they have the authority to look at like all companies and other governmental bodies To achieve the 50-50. | ||
| Kindergartens, schools, universities, everything. | ||
| Everything has to be gender mainstreamed. | ||
| And it's all run by women. | ||
| There are only women working at the... Right, so when you do this then as a private businessman, how does that affect you? | ||
| You know, funny thing is like when I when my YouTube channel started taking off, my business partner, he was like, OK, what's happening? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| This might actually hurt our business interests. | ||
| And I said, well, you know, if we start seeing some some, you know, disasters happening because of what I'm saying online, we'll have a conversation. | ||
| OK, so we tried it for a while. | ||
| Turns out business is booming because now people are there, you know, finding me just because they see my videos and I want to work for your company. | ||
| So even though we have all these enemies now, those are people I wouldn't want to work with anyway. | ||
| Right, but what about on the hiring side though? | ||
| I mean, when you're actually hiring people, do you have to look at those immutable characteristics to figure out who you're going to hire? | ||
| Well, I don't handle the recruiting anymore personally, so I've kind of removed myself, my face from that a bit. | ||
| I don't think it's much of a problem because Sweden has a general problem when it comes to recruiting talented people. | ||
| We don't have enough of them. | ||
| We have a lot of people that are going on subsidies and various government programs, loads, but I mean IT, recruiting very smart IT professionals. | ||
| That's generally very difficult. | ||
| Although I find I have quite a few of them, these software guys that are quite libertarian. | ||
| So no, I don't see it as a great problem. | ||
| Here's another thing I'd like to mention. | ||
| You're not allowed to ask people anything you want when you hire them in Sweden. | ||
| So when I first started out my company, I would ask people, are you in any unions? | ||
| Because I don't want any unionized people in my companies. | ||
| And then my HR eventually said, you gotta stop saying that, Henrik. | ||
| It's illegal. | ||
| You cannot ask them if they're unionized. | ||
| So now we have a text when we recruit, which is kind of like, are you a very collectivistically minded person? | ||
| This might not be the place for you. | ||
| Yeah, jeez. | ||
| I mean, this is happening everywhere now, so nothing surprising. | ||
| I think it does hurt kids, because if you're raising up entire generations of girls telling them that they are beautiful and weak and strong at the same time and can do no wrong, well, you're turning them into sexist fascists, basically. | ||
| And you're telling all the boys that they are inherently evil, and we've been doing this for a long time now. | ||
| So is that the part that's particularly perverse about this? | ||
| So you take a society, you make them equal, then at the same time, because you know that humans are gonna have individual emotions, you keep telling the males that they're evil, despite the fact that you in Sweden have done more for equality than virtually anybody. | ||
| So it's really like it's just never enough, because actually, as you guys know, what they want is not really equality. | ||
| It's conformity. | ||
| Conformity is what they want. | ||
| And I've been trying to tell them that this would be as if someone came out as gay, and you told them, no, suppress that, right? | ||
| Because that's what you're telling the boys, like, oh, you feel the need to run around and play football, suppress it. | ||
| And you're telling the girls, like, you're playing with dolls, bad girl, go out and play football. | ||
| Now before the haters get in here and say, oh, Aaron Flam doesn't want boys to play with Barbies, you actually are perfectly okay. | ||
| I never played football. | ||
| I was not the type. | ||
| You have a huge Barbie collection. | ||
| Which for a man of your age is a bit much. | ||
| I was into He-Man and Star Wars figurines or action figures. | ||
| Yes, you call them that to make them sound more manly, but they're basically dolls. | ||
| I'll show you my collection. | ||
| Let's shift a little bit because you mentioned actually that you lived in, I believe you're moving, in Malmo. | ||
| Now we hear a lot about Malmo on a certain side of the internet. | ||
| where they report on a lot of bombings and stabbings and all these weird things coming out of Malmo. | ||
| Now, we only hear of this from sort of right, what I would say are not just center-right, but more right-leaning things, outlets in America. | ||
| And then anyone that reports on them says that they're racist and they're bigoted and the rest of it. | ||
| You live in Malmo. | ||
| What happened in Malmo? | ||
| And just tell me a little bit about the history of Malmo before anything else. | ||
| Malmö is in the deep south of Sweden. | ||
| So it's a port city. | ||
| This is where basically everyone that's coming to Sweden, by foot or by car, they will enter across a bridge and they come into Malmö. | ||
| So we have a very large number of refugees and so forth from the crisis of 2015. | ||
| And Malmo has always been a rather poor city. | ||
| They used to have big big ships there and in the 1980s that all collapsed and everyone was an alcoholic for a while. | ||
| Then it became slightly better, but it's a loss-making city and it's been run by socialists for a better part of the last hundred years. | ||
| Now, over time, Crime in Malmö started to rise uncontrollably. | ||
| And again, coming back to the same topic all the time, this concept of being quiet about what is happening. | ||
| Because it's considered rude to mention the fact that we might have a drug war going on in this city. | ||
| And that's what we have right now. | ||
| People are working very hard at putting out different kinds of representations, statistical representations, saying everything is fine. | ||
| But you know, it's getting harder and harder for them to do that, because everyone knows that we did not used to have like weekly bombs going off in the city center, for one thing. | ||
| And if I can, I'd like to sort of tie this back to a personal experience. | ||
| You mentioned that time that I was burglarized. | ||
| And what's really interesting about that story is not so much the fact that I was burglarized, but rather the reaction I got from the media when I wrote about this. | ||
| And from the police, when you asked them, what can I do about this? | ||
| This is an incredible story. | ||
| I'll just make it really short, you know. | ||
| I wake up in the middle of the night, you know, somebody's trying to break into our house. | ||
| I carry my, you know, my twin girls upstairs, arm myself with a hammer because I didn't have a gun at home. | ||
| Hammer! | ||
| I'm on the phone with the police. | ||
| They're trying to, you know, force entry through our front door. | ||
| And the police is saying, be quiet. | ||
| Don't make your presence known. | ||
| We'll be there shortly. | ||
| And my neighbor comes home. | ||
| We have a shared walkway. | ||
| He scared them off by turning on the lights. | ||
| So they got away. | ||
| 30 minutes later, I'm giving my testimony to the police, sitting in my kitchen. | ||
| And I ask him at the end of the interview, it's like, so what can I do to protect myself and my family from this ever happening again? | ||
| And literally, he does this. | ||
| Seriously, don't live in this city. | ||
| It is out of control. | ||
| We cannot control it. | ||
| This was in 2007. | ||
| You know, that year, I think, I believe I paid about 12 million in taxes. | ||
| And I live in a very, you know, fashionable part of town, as I expect. | ||
| I've been to his penthouse. | ||
| It's very nice. | ||
| That's where I interviewed you. | ||
| I expect a better answer by the police than them telling me to leave. | ||
| So I wrote an editorial about this in Sweden's largest conservative newspaper and told the story about basically what the policeman told me, which I thought was the really shocking part. | ||
| The reaction by the local newspaper in Malmo was they didn't speak to me. | ||
| They spoke to the paper that took my editorial and said, this is completely unacceptable. | ||
| What poor taste and journalistic unprofessionalism that you should publish an alarmist, populistic text like this, which is drawing the attention from the people in need. | ||
| This is a wealthy capitalist. | ||
| He's spoiled and you should not listen to this alarmism. | ||
| And that really shocked me, because I had journalists attacking me on Facebook. | ||
| Why do you write, why do you put a text like that out there? | ||
| And this was just when I was starting my YouTube channel, so this... And then you got called racist and the rest of it, right? | ||
| Racist, fascist, bigoted, right-wing nutjob, you know. | ||
| They started using the word whore. | ||
| But so all this being said, you stayed in Malmö for... | ||
| Well, he's not Jewish. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll get to that in a second. | |
| But you stayed. | ||
| Yeah, we stayed. | ||
| Then the crime situation has escalated. | ||
| The straw that broke the camel's back this summer, and I made a video about this, it was so tragic. | ||
| Because these drug cartels are basically fighting it out in Malmo. | ||
| They shot a young mother in the head while she was carrying... And I can hardly speak about this because it really upsets me, to be honest. | ||
| They shot her dead in the head while she was carrying her newborn baby because she was affiliated with one of the drug gangs. | ||
| There was a trial thing going on. | ||
| This was nine o'clock in the morning. | ||
| on a public street in one of the most affluent neighborhoods in the city. | ||
| And it just, it really broke me. | ||
| I am not raising my children in this city. | ||
| So, so now we're looking for a house outside the city. | ||
| So you're on your way out. | ||
| As the representative of all Jewish people in Sweden. | ||
| Please, they wouldn't like that at all. | ||
| I bet you secretly they would. | ||
| Maybe they wouldn't want their neighbors to know. | ||
| But there's only, what, about 7,000 Jews left in Sweden? | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Maybe 8,000. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It fluctuates nowadays. | ||
| But can you sort of explain what's happening? | ||
| But Malmö used to have a vibrant Jewish community of around 3,000 Jews for 100 years. | ||
| And by now there's probably maybe 300 Jews left. | ||
| They've all left Malmo in the last few years. | ||
| They go either to Stockholm if they're young or if they can to America or Canada or Israel. | ||
| So they've evacuated the city pretty much and it has gone so far that two private individuals donated 40 million of their own money to the Jewish congregation so that they can manage security for the 300 individuals left just for the coming 10 years. | ||
| One of them was Don Olofsson, right? | ||
| That you have interviewed. | ||
| He was on my show and I'm hoping to get him on your show as well. | ||
| Yes, but we will talk about different subjects. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You talked about entrepreneurship and I will talk about... He's a massive entrepreneur, super talented. | |
| Well, you'd have to be to donate 20 million out of your own pocket to found Sweden's first private militia, which is basically what it will become. | ||
| Can you explain sort of, so you were talking about kind of gang violence and that sort of thing. | ||
| Well, can you explain how that's sort of related to why Jews would be getting out specifically? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Because now we're seeing this sort of all over Europe. | ||
| No problem at all. | ||
| So, we've had a huge influx of immigration from poor Middle Eastern and North African countries, where state anti-Semitism is part of everyday life growing up. | ||
| So they come to us, and they're still anti-Semites. | ||
| And the socialists of Sweden, being on Hitler's side until the end of the World War and never dealing with that, have been, you know, it's a low-simmering sort of thing that they've never dealt with. | ||
| And they have an alliance, and they don't care if the Jews are We need to mention that the social democrats who have been ruling for a long time, they are actively siding with Palestine in the Middle Eastern question. | ||
| You know, the historical, this goes way back, but it's got something to do with Israel being in cahoots with America, and America is the great Satan. | ||
| So then, because if you're a socialist, being oppressed is a currency. | ||
| The Palestinians are the more oppressed, so they side with them. | ||
| But we have, you know, the youth organization of the Social Democratic Party, and I'll send you a video of this, you can see it for yourself. | ||
| When they demonstrate, like on the 1st of May, they have sort of a socialist holiday where they celebrate, I don't know, whatever socialists celebrate. | ||
| Potato Day? | ||
| What do socialists celebrate? | ||
| First of May is International Workers' Day. | ||
| They celebrate being poor. | ||
| Now they will hate me more. | ||
| They sang, and this is on video, the last time the demonstration walked through the city. | ||
| They always sing that song. | ||
| just got caught on tape. | ||
|
unidentified
|
[singing] | |
| I think you can pick out a couple of words right there. | ||
| It means celebrate, celebrate, celebrate Palestine and crush Zionism. | ||
| And this is the socialist youth organization people. | ||
| These are middle class Swedish people. | ||
| And to me, that's an outrage. | ||
| It's an outrage. | ||
| They never speak about this. | ||
| No, and the former strongman of Malmö, the social democratic leader Ilmar Reepalu, he had, I mean, antisemitism, he has been accused of being an antisemite for Decades now, but he always denied it and by now they can't deny it because there is no there are no Jews left So yeah, can you guys explain a little bit about how the? | ||
| immigration Issue arose that basically this all started just in the last really seven years something like that that a pretty much homogeneous society for better or worse Decided I think but correct me if I'm wrong I think probably with good intentions by people that weren't thinking that much and to bring in a ton of people. | ||
| How many immigrants roughly have come in over the last half decade or so? | ||
| You can take this one, I think. | ||
| If you take it over a decade, the numbers are always changing because they're playing around with them, so it depends on how you kind of calculate it, but it is a bit over a million people. | ||
| So roughly a tenth of the population came in, let's say, in the last decade from these countries. | ||
| What do you think the leaders thought exactly was going to happen? | ||
| Let's say well-intentioned, but do you think maybe I'm giving them too much credit? | ||
| No, let's do the well-intentioned, because I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. | ||
| I think they were hoping for a multicultural nirvana with kebabs and some belly dancing, and that everyone else... And a lot of smoked fish. | ||
| You guys are killing it in the smoked fish game, by the way. | ||
| We do have some delicious out of that. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| But other than that, I think the idea is if you live in a culture that is so homogenous as Sweden is, you cannot think outside the box of our own culture. | ||
| They don't even perceive that we have a culture. | ||
| They probably believe... | ||
| They will become Swedes very quickly when they realize how right and good we are. | ||
| Turns out it didn't happen. | ||
| So if we were not to give them the benefit of the doubt, because I also I try not to go to people's motives and I think the road to hell is paved with good intentions and I think a lot of these people think they're doing the right thing, but let's go to the non-good motive part. | ||
| I think you just wrote a book about it. | ||
| I mean, what do you think these people thought they were doing, or what do you think they thought was going to happen? | ||
| Just when you change demographics that much, a tenth of a population is a huge, huge, huge amount. | ||
| Well, I think they wanted to… So, the Social Democrats came into power. | ||
| They actually lifted up the working class to a much better living standard. | ||
| And the idea was, as soon as we get them up to middle-class living standards, they will become true communists and understand that they need to devote everything to the struggle. | ||
| What happened in reality was that they were perfectly fine with their flat-screen TVs. | ||
| They wanted more flat-screen TVs and longer vacation time. | ||
| They didn't want to join a communist revolution. | ||
| They became, in essence, well, our equivalent of Republicans, I suppose. | ||
| So they needed new voters. | ||
| In a sense. | ||
| And they invoked—and then they took in a lot of people into the most overregulated labor market in the world. | ||
| And these people, second-generation and third-generation immigrants, they're not getting into the system. | ||
| They're keeping them for the ballots. | ||
| They want their votes, and they keep them on subsidies. | ||
| And some of these kids, they see that the system is rigged against them, and they have no choice. | ||
| They will—of course they will become gangsters or go off and fight for ISIS after a while. | ||
| I think— Not all of them, obviously. | ||
| I think it's important at this point to remember that the people that came in Those individuals, it's not their fault, inherently. | ||
| They were invited. | ||
| That's why I asked about the intentions, good or bad, of the people that brought them in, not these people. | ||
| I like to think that crowds always go crazy, but individuals are much more reasonable. | ||
| Somebody is fleeing a war. | ||
| I have the deepest sympathy. | ||
| Yes, of course, I would do the same thing. | ||
| But it is irresponsible if you have a so regulated labor market and you're taking more people than you can help. | ||
| It's like you're throwing a party that goes haywire on Facebook. | ||
| Everyone's invited. | ||
| You know, I have drinks for 12 people. | ||
| What did they think that people were gonna do? | ||
| Like, what kind of jobs did they think people were gonna have? | ||
| Or did they immediately say, you're taken care of for a year? | ||
| You know, we hear these stories out of Germany. | ||
| Well, the government wanted to start a camel farm in Gothenburg. | ||
| Well, that was one experiment for some, and that's a, yeah, that was crazy. | ||
| And sort of racist. | ||
| No, we can't give you a proper job, but we'll give you some subsidies. | ||
| Start a camel farm. | ||
| You should be good at that. | ||
| And also, we have plenty of camels in Sweden. | ||
| No, we don't. | ||
| So truly, people come in, and as you said, they're often fleeing war. | ||
| You have sympathies with all these people. | ||
| The government then says, here's some stuff, but you can't have it forever, although they sort of do have it forever, but not just that you can't have it forever. | ||
| It's a limited amount of stuff, right? | ||
| We can't put you, and then they can turn around and say, see, we're also racist because we didn't make you millionaires in night one. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They get a flat, they get a minimum living subsidy, and then they are expected to vote left. | ||
| And that is what it looks like if you break down the statistics of different municipalities and how they vote. | ||
| I mean, in Rosengård and Malmö it was like 70 to 90 percent voted for the Social Democrat or the left. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| I mean, we have the numbers for all of that. | ||
| But what's happened is, tragically, we created a tremendous segregation. | ||
| A new underclass, if you will. | ||
| An immigrant underclass, which Sweden never had. | ||
| And we don't know how to deal with it. | ||
| And we're also running out of money because we have the most expensive welfare system in the world. | ||
| And now we're trying to deal with it. | ||
| Nobody knows what to do. | ||
| This is a sort of dangerous question in a way, but I think these conversations always end up here, which is, do you think in a weird way, this then breeds racism? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That good intentioned people, right? | ||
| I mean, you just made it very clear. | ||
| You have no ill will towards these people. | ||
| But then these people come into these countries, they're given these things, they demand more, the politicians use them for votes, and then good people who are not racist, but maybe don't have a lot of time to think about all these things, suddenly start becoming kind of racist. | ||
| It's just a sad fact of humanity. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And I think it goes both ways. | ||
| I think the Swedes wanted to invite poor people from the third world to come and live in Sweden because they wanted to feel good themselves. | ||
| But also they thought everyone would want to become Swedish, of course. | ||
| But then they get a lot of immigrants and the immigrants look at the Swedish society and they're like, maybe I'm going to keep some of my own culture. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I don't think this is so great. | ||
| And if you were to sort of... And also, if you keep them out of the system and you never let them in and you stick them in ghettos, of course they will start to hate you. | ||
| And there's a weird thing that I think Europe has that America doesn't have, which is that if you were to assimilate them more, sort of push more of a Swedish culture on them, that would be against Swedish nature in a bizarre way, where America, we have a melting pot here, so come here with all of your traditions and all of those things, but mix into the fabric of America, where Europe has more of a ghettoization I think the reason America can do this better is because your country is founded on the principle of individuality and individuals, whereas Sweden is founded on the idea of collectivism. | ||
| And that makes it really hard to break the molds. | ||
| Now, I have a good friend who's doing a lot of work with newly arrived African boys. | ||
| And like the top question, this is Mustafa Panjshiri, the question he is most often asked by these guys is like, how do I make Swedish friends? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They never open up. | ||
| I'm never in touch with them. | ||
| And at the same time, I mean, this is like, again, bringing tears to my eyes. | ||
| They want to work. | ||
| They want to break into becoming useful. | ||
| At the same time, Swedes will be telling you, oh no, how you should behave. | ||
| No, I couldn't possibly tell you. | ||
| Just be yourself. | ||
| And they give nothing away because they don't understand being so collectivist. | ||
| Like, we have a very closed, very complicated culture. | ||
| And if we want to invite people into our culture, we need to start, you know, here we do it this way. | ||
| This is, you know, but that is considered almost racist, certainly socially aggressive, to tell people that, well, this is how we do things around here. | ||
| We take off our shoes before we come into someone's home. | ||
| That is quite unique. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's us and the Japanese, although we're more sloppy than the Japanese, I think. | ||
| But there are all these unwritten rules. | ||
| Of course there are. | ||
| But for the longest time, Swedes denied that because it would be racist to admit we had our own culture. | ||
| Can you guys talk a little bit about how you differentiate from some of the other Nordic countries? | ||
| Because as I said, we always point to the Nordic countries, but Sweden is the one that we really focus on. | ||
| But it sounds, from what I could tell, and I did visit Denmark and I visited Finland and a couple other places, Denmark doesn't seem to have the problems as much as Sweden. | ||
| Well, they did up until they had those cartoonist scandals, and then they sort of understood what it was all about. | ||
| If you can't criticize Mohammed, that's basically blasphemy laws, and no modern Western state would stand for that. | ||
| I've had Firming Rozan, who obviously, you know, is the... | ||
| Yes, publisher of the cartoons and I mean what an absolute brave person and someone who is you know now has to live unfortunately with a lifetime of security Who the idea that this is a racist or bigot is so patently absurd. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It was a Muslim Author who was trying to find a cartoonist that sparked the whole idea in the first place. | ||
| Yeah, I know he was trying to help I mean, it's yeah But I also think, culturally, over hundreds of years, Sweden and Denmark, they've fought for supremacy in Scandinavia, and they sort of culturally define themselves in opposition to each other. | ||
| So, Danes are more—they're closer to the continent. | ||
| They're more vivacious. | ||
| They like to call a shovel a shovel. | ||
| Actually, in Danish, it's a spade a spade, but that would be wrong here, I think. | ||
| And Sweden is completely the opposite. | ||
| Don't rock the boat. | ||
| Well, you know, if you look at this from a historical perspective, I think it's fair to say that Sweden was the Nordic superpower in the 1600s. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We'd basically taken over the rest of the Scandinavian countries. | ||
| And then we kind of gradually lost control of that. | ||
| We gave Norway independence and Denmark broke off. | ||
| But the languages and the culture is fairly similar. | ||
| But Sweden's attitude has remained as The stuck-up big brother that always knows best. | ||
| I mean, we are a very arrogant culture, if I can say so myself. | ||
| I think it's pretty clear that the Danes, for instance, they think we're stuck up and we're just plain wrong. | ||
| And now that we're up, you know, we've gone a bad way. | ||
|
unidentified
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By now we're proven wrong. | |
| It is so embarrassing to admit it. | ||
| So now it's like, you know, a situation where, no, I have to maintain that I'm doing it this way because it's too embarrassing to come out to say, okay, that was a big mistake, I'm sorry. | ||
| You know, the Danes are putting up border controls against Sweden now, because we don't want your problems with bombs you have in Malmo to be exported into Copenhagen. | ||
| Right, but if you talk about those problems. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You'll still have a lot of trouble. | ||
| No, and the response when Denmark did that, the response from Swedish politicians was like, oh, this is completely alarmist, but we welcome the Danes to do what they please. | ||
| So they were just saving face. | ||
| But it's, I mean, for Sweden, which is one of the most advanced IT service countries in the world, to have to deal with the fact that people are saying, we have to have border controls to you guys because there's so much craziness spilling into our country. | ||
| This analogy that you mentioned of sort of a Hollywood facade on all this, as I said, it looks too good on the outside, I really do think is part of the problem. | ||
| It looks too good from the outside. | ||
| Everyone looks too good, and everyone's clothes look too neat and new and pressed and great, and everyone looks sort of too healthy. | ||
| And I guess that's not in every city, but it's at least what's exported. | ||
| Well, we have far-reaching eugenics, eugenic programs that took care of that. | ||
| That's probably a whole other show. | ||
| That's when you get guys like this. | ||
| Look at the perfection. | ||
| Is there anything else that we didn't hit on in the real meat of all of this? | ||
| Has it been an hour already? | ||
| It's basically been an hour, yeah. | ||
| I'm sorry, it's because he talks all the time. | ||
| It's a lot of talking. | ||
| But I've been here before, so it's fine. | ||
| No, I think we're fine for now, aren't we? | ||
| Or was it anything else you wanted to talk about? | ||
| No, I was asking you guys because... | ||
| No, I think it was great. | ||
| This was as much of a recap of, well I guess we should talk a little bit about IKEA or some of your other wonderful... We can talk about, he ordered a drink the other night when we were to dinner and they made him put it together himself as revenge for all the IKEA furniture they bought. | ||
| No, you ordered a what, like an Irish coffee or something? | ||
| I wanted an Irish coffee for dessert, and it came in parts. | ||
| I got a cup of coffee, and what's in it now? | ||
| Whiskey? | ||
| Or cognac? | ||
| Baileys? | ||
| Three separate glasses, so I had to build it. | ||
| You can tell the serving staff, they were They were getting even. | ||
| We were lacking the cream. | ||
| So just like in Ikea, we got missing. | ||
| But you did have your Allen wrench with you and you were able to put it together very quickly. | ||
| We made it work. | ||
| I do have a lot of Ikea here. | ||
| I'll give you a tour of my Ikea. | ||
| In LA, we have the world's biggest Ikea. | ||
| Did you know that? | ||
| No, I did not. | ||
| It is in Burbank. | ||
| We may have to go there this afternoon. | ||
| The world's biggest IKEA. | ||
| If I went with two Swedes? | ||
| No, they wouldn't give you the royal treatment, trust me. | ||
| No, nothing. | ||
| No, nothing. | ||
|
unidentified
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They'd probably, well, with you two, I'd probably be... We'd be kicked out, we'd be kicked out. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It has been a pleasure chatting with you guys. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Because you are professional podcast YouTube hosts, I'm gonna let you guys pimp yourselves out directly to camera. | ||
| Henrik, right over there. | ||
| Thank you, Dave. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Well, if you are interested in Europe in general, Sweden specifically, you can check out my channel where I do weekly commentaries on current issues. | ||
| I do analysis on economic, business, finance, that sort of thing with a European eye on it. | ||
| I also do stuff to explain this for an English speaking audience. | ||
| I'm really a businessman, so this is more of a vocation than a profession for me. | ||
| But I think it would be interesting for me to find an English-speaking audience. | ||
| What's the name of your YouTube channel? | ||
| My YouTube channel, if you put in Henrik J, you will find my English-speaking channel. | ||
| And from there you can find my Swedish one if you want more content. | ||
| It's all subtitled in English so you can see it. | ||
| But then you really have to be a sort of Sweden nerd if you want to go into Swedish interior politics. | ||
| He is a pro, so I really sent you up here. | ||
| He is, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| Look into the camera. | ||
| Oh my God! | ||
| My name is Aaron Flam. | ||
| I'm a Swedish comedian and podcaster. | ||
| The name of my podcast is Deconstructive Criticism. | ||
| I have a few episodes in English. | ||
| I've just finished a book that I wrote and published myself in Sweden about the situation the Western world finds itself in today because of what happened in the past. | ||
| There will be an English translation on my webpage, aaronflam.com, soon enough. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, gentlemen, I consider us colleagues now. | ||
| We are. | ||
| In the world that we exist in, but more importantly, I consider us friends. | ||
| We had a great time the other night, and I know this is just the beginning of things that we'll all do together. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Follow these guys on Twitter and on YouTube and all those good places, and get over to Sweden and visit them. | ||
| You'll take people out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| I take good care of my guests, don't I? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| All right. | ||
| Thanks, everybody. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about international issues instead of nonstop yelling, check out our international playlist. | ||
|
unidentified
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And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | |
| They're all right over here. |
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