Jan. 26, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:06:59
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| If I had been doing it for the money and was a grifter, and I remember this moment when I became aware that my thoughts and opinions were different than most of my peers, and I was like, oh... It's scary, right? | ||
| I need to make a choice. | ||
| I either need to just be honest, or I'm smart enough to be able to just parrot the talking points and be like, derp-a-derr, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, Trump is Hitler. | |
| That's hilarious when they say that over and over. | ||
| A billion retweets? | ||
| That would be grifting for me. | ||
| That would be a grift. | ||
| This is The Rubin Report, and according to the Deep State, I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
| Quick reminder, guys, subscribe to our YouTube channel, which gives you just a teeny tiny chance of actually seeing our videos. | ||
| All right then, joining me today is a writer, a comedian, and host of The Dumpster Fire, right here on YouTube, Bridget Phetasy. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| I'm back. | ||
| All right, lady, you're back. | ||
| We're both still here. | ||
| Last time I had you on here, you were at the beginnings of your political evolution. | ||
| You were saying, I don't know what's going on with this world. | ||
| You were trying to make some sense of the world. | ||
| I still have no idea. | ||
| Well, a year later or whatever it's been, barely a year. | ||
| Barely a year. | ||
| Barely a year. | ||
| You're one of, you know, you're on the short list of people that make some sense to me. | ||
| So what does that say about me? | ||
| A, that's terrifying. | ||
| People say this to me and I'm like, you know that the world has gone crazy if somehow I'm a voice of reason. | ||
| And I get a lot of, so I guess what's happened is, it's true, it has been kind of an exponential, I guess, Just from like a statistical point of view and numbers point of view, on something like Twitter, it has been exponential rise or growth. | ||
| And with that comes a lot of criticism and different opinions. | ||
| You get criticism and people saying mean things to you on social media? | ||
| I know it's strange. | ||
| I know that this doesn't affect other people, but it really seems to affect me particularly. | ||
| No, but I feel like the criticism I get all the time is I'm a grifter. | ||
| You know, like I'm some, like I was one way, and then now I'm another way, grifting, but, and they're like, you know, eventually you're gonna need to knock off this both sides routine of yours because you're always trying to just, I'm like, I'm just being me though, I'm really just confused. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think that that's sort of what's working for you more than anything else? | ||
| Like there's an up, well, there's just an upfrontness about your evolution. | ||
| Like for me, something like five years ago, I just started saying, ah, guys, I'm a liberal, but something ain't right around here. | ||
| And then it was just, people started going, oh, me too. | ||
| And I sense you're sort of like just constantly in that thing. | ||
| I was one of those people though. | ||
| That was like, oh, hey. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| But I think the difference between us is that you are already kind of in the political world. | ||
| And what was your degree in? | ||
| Political science. | ||
| I'm one of three people that ever used a political science degree for politics. | ||
| And you went to college. | ||
| I dropped out. | ||
| I was smoking a lot of pot. | ||
| Yeah, but I was blacked out and smoking a lot of pot. | ||
| Waitressing and I say this to people a lot that I you know I talked about the factory settings and how I think when you're just when you have your head down and I didn't know until maybe a Maybe last February how I was gonna pay more than two months worth of bills ever since when I was 17 so when you have your head down just trying to figure that stuff out you're not really paying attention to the Anything else yeah, I was just trying to make money and wait tables, and I moved to LA so that I could be a content creator I wanted to write television shows and do comedy and I didn't I was never I was not aware There was a culture war going on which sounds completely naive of me and Michael Malice has said to me You know that just goes to show you how how I? | ||
| How entrenched the Cathedral is in terms of media and entertainment and academia is that I didn't even know I was in the Cathedral, right? | ||
| Do you sense that? | ||
| Getting the criticism of grifter. | ||
| Yeah, somehow you're doing this for money Even though as you said, it's just literally a year and a half ago or you're like, you know scrounging around all that. | ||
| I And also, you know, it's also funny because people think just because, like, we're on YouTube and we have a little powder on our faces that we're, like, rolling in dough. | ||
| And it's like, I'm not complaining by any stretch. | ||
| And it was a long time to get here, you know what I mean? | ||
| And I'm just somewhere on my journey, as you are. | ||
| But I find that this thing of, like, because a lot of people in our space now get thrown with grifter or you're doing it for the money or you're a seller or something like that. | ||
| And in a weird way, while that used to bother me, now it's becoming, in some ways, | ||
| it's the ultimate compliment, 'cause it's almost like they have nothing left. | ||
| Like there's nothing left about the ideas that you put forth or the positions that you hold, | ||
| because you actually hold a mixed bag of sort of left-right positions, | ||
| which I think most people do. | ||
| So all they got is, ah, she's doing it for the money. | ||
| She's doing it for the money. | ||
| As if you were like, oh, if I just stuck out that position over there, | ||
| that's where the money rolls. | ||
| If I had been doing it for the money and was a grifter, and I remember this moment when I became aware | ||
| that my thoughts and opinions were different than most of my peers, and I was like, oh. (laughs) | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's scary, right? | |
| I need to make a choice. | ||
| I either need to just be honest, or I'm smart enough to be able to just parrot the talking points and be like, derp-a-der, you know? | ||
| That's hilarious when they say that over and over. | ||
| A billion retweets. | ||
| That would be grifting for me. | ||
| That would be a grift. | ||
| Because my idea of a grift is that I'm being disingenuous, I'm being dishonest, I'm saying that I have one thing | ||
| and I'm selling another. | ||
| But if I'm selling anything, it's my confusion. | ||
| Well, also, wouldn't a grift also be that you would take the easier way out? | ||
| Like, clearly-- | ||
| Yeah, this is not easy. | ||
| I think the people that are in the space that we're in, whatever you wanna call that, this is the road less traveled, right? | ||
| But if you're on the grift, you don't do the hard thing, you do the easy thing. | ||
| Yeah, it would be easy for me to go in either direction all in, and it would also be easy for me to completely just defect and be like, I'm Magna, you know? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And I've always joked that there are these two strains of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and I can pretty quickly Tell if somebody has one or the other. | ||
| It's if everything is Trump's fault or Trump can do no wrong. | ||
| And it's MAGA and resistance. | ||
| It's like the hashtags. | ||
| And they are, and I feel like most people exist in the gray area in between, but they, they get so bombarded by both sides. | ||
| If they dare to be like, well, I think there might be, you know, I can see this from both sides or there might be a perspective here that they just are like, nah, I'm not, I'm just going to be quiet. | ||
| So speaking of that, it's a good reason to have you on now because I know you're an expert in foreign policy, especially related to Iran, right? | ||
| That's your specific expertise? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's specifically what I'm here for. | |
| No, that obviously is not true, but actually, often in the morning when I wake up and I'm having my coffee and I'm just sort of like slowly getting online and I'm trying to get my thoughts centered, I'll shoot you some text and we'll go back and forth a little bit. | ||
| And one of the things over the last couple weeks that consistently comes up is the craziness related to every single person on Twitter, but I don't wanna make this just about Twitter, but the need for all the celebrities, all of the journalists, air quote journalists, and just everybody to have a opinion on everything at all times. | ||
| Remember, just a couple weeks ago, we were in World War III. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How'd that go? | |
| How'd World War III go for you, by the way? | ||
| It went well. | ||
| I walked my dog. | ||
| That's the crazy thing. | ||
| And we kind of talked about this on Dumpster Fire, my YouTube show, which just makes fun of everything. | ||
| My whole thing with Dumpster Fire is like, we just want to laugh while the world burns. | ||
| Because in the moment when news is breaking and having, it is diplomacy by Twitter now. | ||
| There is serious, you know, there's news breaking. | ||
| The president's tweeting a flag. | ||
| Then the ambassador to the Supreme Leader is tweeting their flag. | ||
| These are, I mean, my roommate Samantha said it perfectly. | ||
| She said it's ender's game meets risk on Twitter. | ||
| It's like the perfect description. | ||
| So there is this real, people are getting hurt, people are affected by this, it's all playing out virtually, and then you close your computer or put your phone down and walk outside and it's like doo-doo-doo-doo-doo. | ||
| Nothing's going on. | ||
| And the majority of people have no idea. | ||
| They're not, like, living in that. | ||
| But if you're in that moment in the news cycle as it's all breaking and everybody's got their takes and the journalists are all trying to figure it out and they're waiting for the Pentagon to confirm things so that they can confirm the rumors they heard, you get that kind of rush. | ||
| What do you make of these people that literally something happens now, and then they have the exact opposite reaction because it was another administration five years ago? | ||
| I'm not talking about somebody that's evolved over time with their political ideas. | ||
| I'm talking about, well, Trump didn't have congressional authorization, and then there's literally five years ago their tweet when they were completely for Libya. | ||
| I mean, Nancy Pelosi's a great example. | ||
| Trump didn't need, and I don't even mean just the people in politics, But there's a video right now that's been going around that I've shared of Pelosi five years ago, or whatever it is, six years ago, saying, Obama didn't need congressional authorization. | ||
| We toppled the Libyan regime in Gaddafi. | ||
| Now he needs it. | ||
| But then everyone just flips on every little thing, because it's all sports. | ||
| So my question is, has it always been like this and we're just more aware of it because everything lives forever? | ||
| Because whataboutism is going to destroy democracy. | ||
| Because you can always say well what about this and what about that and what about this and well actually and go everybody can go back and forth but What are your principles, I guess? | ||
| And it's so easy to just adjust your mind to confirm your own belief and principles anyways that I don't know how anyone really avoids being a hypocrite in politics. | ||
| And maybe it was always like this and we're just more aware of it. | ||
| Yeah, one of the things that I find, which is why I think you're sort of a breath of fresh air in this, is that A, you're not pretending to be an expert in all of these things. | ||
| No, I'm an idiot. | ||
| Despite the fact that someone will now clip, oh, Dave Rubin says the Bridget Phetasy is an Iran expert, you know, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But you're not pretending to be an expert. | ||
| But also, like, you are being funny throughout the day, and it's like, we really have watched comedy get slaughtered in this freaking thing. | ||
| Yeah, it's weird because you'll... | ||
| So I just got told that Dumpster Fire's being shadow banned. | ||
| I don't know if this is true or not. | ||
| So somebody tweeted at you that basically they're subscribed to your channel. | ||
| A bunch of people did. | ||
| A bunch of people, they're subscribed to your channel. | ||
| And my video didn't show up in their feed. | ||
| Bridget, I'm shocked and appalled that YouTube could do that. | ||
| I don't have enough followers for this matter. | ||
| I just went on YouTube like three months ago. | ||
| You're over the target, sister. | ||
| It's happening. | ||
| We make a lot of inappropriate jokes, and I'm, you know, we were joking on this week, so I'm like, Maggie was saying, oh, who's gonna want to sponsor this show? | ||
| Because I said something like, I was joking about how the Golden Globes went vegan, and I was like, I just miss the good old days where, you know, a man could be a man, and a woman was in the kitchen, and Maggie's like, Jesus, you can't make even jokes like that, because someone will clip that, and then say, see, here's Bridget with her internalized patriarchy, Unless you say that everyone from the 1950s was a racist, bigot, homophobe, you're canceled. | ||
| Yeah, but should we just pre-cancel? | ||
| Because comedy is, I think, saying, you know, I said something that was really, it's always those off-the-cuff jokes you make that are completely inappropriate. | ||
| I think I said something about Cardi B, and we were filming, and the dumpster fire, which And I said, you know, she said, threatened to go to Nigeria. | ||
| And I said, I was like, have fun with Boko Haram. | ||
| And Maggie and Sam, who are in there filming with me, my cousin Maggie, who's my producing partner, and Samantha, who's also on the team, they've started dying laughing because that's what's funny is those things that are off the cuff. | ||
| And if you say something like that now, and you aren't in a position like I'm in, which is, Um, slightly immune to cancel culture, you will get canceled or you're in risk of getting canceled. | ||
| So I think comedy has become a lot more afraid. | ||
| And then, you know, the argument that people say is like, cancel culture isn't real, is that people like Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle are making jokes. | ||
| Well, they're millionaires. | ||
| Yes, they're multi, multi, multi. | ||
| And they're powerful. | ||
| So you're just, you can't use people who, or even J.K. Rowling, you can't use billionaires | ||
| and multimillionaires as examples of people who are cancel-proof, because they're cancel-proof | ||
| just because they're rich. | ||
| Do you sense, though, that people like us, maybe if Gervais and Chappelle, let's say, | ||
| are doing it at like the Air Force level, that we're sort of more the foot soldiers in this | ||
| or something like, or we're in the tanks on the ground, and we're offering cover to the average person | ||
| that is the foot soldier in this, that just wants to be able to work a real job, | ||
| but still occasionally say what they think without being mobbed, and we are actually offering them | ||
| a little bit of cover? | ||
| Yeah, I think that people want, people feel confused, and there is that sense of terror that's, but also hilarious, and we were talking about this as well on Dumpster Fire, just how it's, it's almost like a defense, humor for me is a defense mechanism. | ||
| It is for many people, and that's why inappropriate jokes are funny, because you're like, World War 3, right guys? | ||
| And then the memes come out and the memes are hilarious. | ||
| And so people are using humor to try and make sense of a world that's really crazy. | ||
| And then you have all these people who are experts. | ||
| And I always say, no one knows anything. | ||
| I mean, even experts, they might know things about, they might have things to contribute, but no one knows what's going to happen. | ||
| So anyone who's telling you like, here's what's going to happen is really just projecting their own biases and hopes into the world. | ||
| But no one is like Nostradamus. | ||
| They're not gonna, so I think people just wanna laugh to make sense of it. | ||
| You mentioned your factory settings. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which I have credited you with many times. | ||
| Thank you! | ||
| I really appreciate that. | ||
| I'm 99% sure I credited you when I mentioned it in the book. | ||
| I suddenly, as I'm saying it, I'm suddenly afraid that I didn't, but let it be known that you were the first person that came up with the phrase factory settings that I had ever heard. | ||
| Can you just explain what factory settings are? | ||
| I know we talked about it last time, but I think it's such a right way of sort of looking at why everything is so screwed up or sort of how you would take everything down to first principles to then sort of look at the world. | ||
| Yeah, factory settings is really just the default that you were kind of installed as a child. | ||
| For instance, I was raised in a very liberal family. | ||
| It was very East Coast. | ||
| I was thinking about the other day, I'm like, I don't think I even met anyone who was pro-life until I was in my 30s. | ||
| Until you were on Twitter. | ||
| Yeah, maybe! | ||
| I mean, it might have been... I just was not exposed to... I didn't... I was in Minnesota, but we lived in the city, so I was always very much in... And again, I wasn't really, you know, engaging in the debate club at school, so I didn't... I had some conservatives in my life, but my default settings, factory settings, were just, you know, pro-choice. | ||
| Republicans are evil. | ||
| All they care about is money. | ||
| You're the good guys. | ||
| Democrats are nice. | ||
| They care about poor people. | ||
| So do you think that's a personal thing or that generally, when I've used the phrase, maybe this is my own take on it, I've sort of said to people that the factory settings that we're all given pretty much, if you grow up in America or in the last 40 years, let's say, is that that is the narrative. | ||
| So yes, of course, some people are brought up, say, Christian conservative, and they're brought up pro-life or whatever, but that's really an outlier to the main set of ideas that are sort of accepted out of the gate, which are Democrats good, Republicans bad, Democrats for poor people, Republicans for rich people, Democrats, you know, all of that kind of stuff. | ||
| Well, it just depends on where you grow up, because I think everyone's factory settings are different, and it depends on your region. | ||
| So if I was raised somewhere in the South, perhaps, or in Texas, or in a different family, then perhaps I would have different factory settings. | ||
| My very good friend was raised conservative, and he was raised to think all liberals are idiots. | ||
| Lefties, lefties, not liberals. | ||
| Lefties. | ||
| And that they, you know, can't argue any of their own points. | ||
| So he just won't even really engage in a leftist debate because he thinks that that was the way he was raised by his family that was conservative, but it was also known that they were not the mainstream point of view or voice. | ||
| Right, that set of ideas wasn't the thing coming down to you from Hollywood and the media all the time. | ||
| Right, and to kind of keep those ideas somewhat on the down low. | ||
| So even in graduate school he had to, he's had to kind of pretend, just fake, go along with a lot of the crazy stuff that he's seen and just because he wants to kind of swim through and get done and be done with it. | ||
| But so I think that's interesting too. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've been, it's been interesting hearing from as many conservatives as I have in the past couple of years, their own struggles at colleges and how they're kind of these, you know, they're outliers really in the culture. | ||
| And I didn't, I never knew that because I was just like, whatever, give me a week. | ||
| Well, let's back up for a second, though, because that is relative to all this. | ||
| For people that don't know you or didn't see our first interview, you're a former addict, which I think, in a lot of ways, seems to set up sort of your view on all of this, that this isn't, that the culture war for as important as it is, right, and this is what we do every day, and I do believe that this fight is the fight for Western values and all of these things. | ||
| Like, it is important, but that you've already lived through, like, your own existential battle for existence, right? | ||
| I feel like that, you know, I grew up in a kind of crazy household too. | ||
| So I think there are a lot of people probably like me who grew up in dysfunctional homes | ||
| where the culture as it's gone increasingly more crazy, I'm like that meme, the little, you know, | ||
| dog drinking coffee, like this is fine while everything's on fire | ||
| because that was what I was used to. | ||
| So the culture is finally reflecting, like, oh, I know how to handle this. | ||
| The culture has caught up to your dysfunctional home. | ||
| I don't know what that says, yeah. | ||
| But I think the existential crisis, the first time I had it was 19. | ||
| Let's be clear, I'm still an addict. | ||
| I was making you a retired addict. | ||
| No, yeah, no, that's still there. | ||
| I can do anything addictively, even if it's good for me. | ||
| And I do have like a crazy, you know, I get fixated on things and obsessed with them. | ||
| Twitter is a great example. | ||
| I have a hard time. | ||
| People are always like, how do I get on Twitter? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do I do? | |
| I don't know what to tell them because I love Twitter. | ||
| I need to put myself away. | ||
| But you take some breaks too. | ||
| I do. | ||
| And I have a pretty healthy relationship to social media for the most part. | ||
| And it's about to get healthier. | ||
| We're going to talk about that in just a few minutes. | ||
| My, my, I think what being in recovery has done for me during all of this craziness, and I have, I just celebrated six years of sobriety in October, it, I can't personally be in anger or resentment because it puts my sobriety in danger. | ||
| So I can't live with that stuff. | ||
| So I quickly have to figure out how to come into acceptance. | ||
| Some of the biggest problems, and I'm sure this existed with conservatives when Obama was president, I just never saw it. | ||
| Well, because factory settings for most society didn't let it get there. | ||
| The cathedral, as Michael has explained it. | ||
| That cognitive dissonance, but in particularly on the left, and this is what's really so fascinating to me psychologically, is trying to align those things of watching people applaud dictatorships and regimes, applaud things like the economy crashing, so that their view of a person can be correct is really unsettling to me because that is, | ||
| you are willing to see people suffer to validate your own rightness? | ||
| Like, come on! | ||
| Can't you self-reflect at all? | ||
| Can't you look at yourself and see that you're cheering for the supreme leader so that you can be right? | ||
| How is there... And then I'll read these, you know, psychological studies about how It feels better for people to have their beliefs validated, no matter what those beliefs are, than to be challenged. | ||
| And we see crazy, crazy examples of this. | ||
| Like, this is not just something you're saying as if, oh, these are random Twitter people doing it. | ||
| I mean, a couple of them are. | ||
| Bill Maher literally said it would be great if the economy crashed so that Trump would get out. | ||
| And it's like, well, that's pretty easy for you to say, you know, guy that probably is worth 100 million bucks. | ||
| That's one thing. | ||
| Talk about privilege. | ||
| I mean, jeez. | ||
| The other one, though, a couple weeks ago on The View, when Joy Behar was saying, Joy Behar says, a bit of good news, white nationalist Richard Spencer is no longer supporting Donald Trump. | ||
| He regrets supporting Donald Trump because of the Iran strike. | ||
| And the audience cheered, which meant that they were cheering that the white nationalist no longer supports Trump, as if Trump is worse than the white nationalist. | ||
| We made fun of this on Dumpster Fire. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was like, the audience is like, yay! | |
| Yay, the white nationalist agrees with us! | ||
| Trump is a bad man, yay! | ||
| I'm like, what? | ||
| How can you sit and, that is what is, I think for most Americans, I still hold onto the faith that most Americans are looking at all of this and going like, what the, you know? | ||
| You can say it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What the fuck? | |
| There you go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Doesn't that feel nice? | |
| It does. | ||
| And there's craziness all around. | ||
| It's not just on one side or another. | ||
| It does feel chaotic everywhere. | ||
| But that in particular, that cognitive dissonance is But do you see a link there between that and something that you went through with addiction? | ||
| The need to keep doubling down or something like that? | ||
| You're always rationalizing your existence? | ||
| Being an addict made me not trust my thoughts. | ||
| And so, and I tell this to people about reading the news, you have to be aware of your own biases. | ||
| I'm very aware of my own biases. | ||
| I'm very aware, and there are probably some that I'm not aware of, but I'm as much as I can be aware of them. | ||
| And I'm aware of my defects and my addictions and my weaknesses. | ||
| And in order to get sober, you really have to take, in my instance, I had to take a very hard look at all of that. | ||
| And it would be very easy for me to justify just going. | ||
| I could have easily said, because I wasn't going into the election some huge Trump fan, I could have easily the night that he was elected said, I'm gonna drink. | ||
| You know, like, I can't live like this, and I don't have that luxury, because I will probably die or end up in a bad state. | ||
| And I quickly, and this is what I was saying, is that the thing that's lacking when you have cognitive dissonance is acceptance, generally. | ||
| Being able to accept what is, and so much of that craziness On the left right now, because I'm sure it was true with Obama, but right now, because they lost, they cannot accept that he won. | ||
| They just cannot accept it, still. | ||
| Have you found any tricks? | ||
| People ask me all the time, well, Dave, you seem to have made a little headway with some of these people, right? | ||
| Like helping the struggling lefties understand really what liberalism is or whatever. | ||
| But as someone that comes from a similar place in that regard, have you found any tricks to break these people? | ||
| I mean, I guess comedy is really the one. | ||
| Yeah, comedy. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So I think my sense is that there's anyone right of Bernie and then the people left of Bernie, I guess. | ||
| And I think once you're in the hashtag resistance, Trump derangement syndrome, whatever you want to call it, that strain, the only way you have an epiphany is when you get canceled. | ||
| So when the mob inevitably comes for you, which it will, then suddenly you'll see these people coming and asking for my help or advice or like, oh my gosh, I didn't see this because so much of my personal awakening was when I was saying things out of lockstep. | ||
| First, it's like, well, why am I self-censoring? | ||
| Okay, well, I'll stop self-censoring. | ||
| You quickly realize why you're self-censoring when you start just saying your thing. | ||
| And once your own tribe kind of turns on you and comes for you, well, you start questioning that tribe. | ||
| So I know you don't consider yourself on the right, or certainly not a Republican or a conservative or something like that, but are you always shocked still? | ||
| So this would be my follow-up to our conversation a year ago, where I was sorta like, I kinda know where you're gonna be in a year or something like that. | ||
| Are you kinda like, boy, these conservatives and libertarians, at least right now, are just pretty nice. | ||
| Do you ever get shit from them, really? | ||
| That's been really interesting to see. | ||
| They're more willing to engage in conversations. | ||
| I always joke that, you know, I think I joked even the last time I was here, but I've started doing stand-up about it. | ||
| The factory settings, I always thought I was liberal. | ||
| And then they tell you when you get sober that you won't even recognize yourself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I'm like, how much weed was I smoking? | |
| I'm a conservative now, and then conservatives will start talking about porn, and I'm like, oh, thank God, I'm not with you guys. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Because the minute they start talking about, like, porn and stuff, I'm like, oh, I'm not one of you either. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Thank God. | ||
| Wait, let's talk about that thing. | ||
| So there was a few weeks ago, there was this thing, was it Matt Walsh? | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| So Matt Walsh, who's a Daily Wire guy, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Just clean this up, or do you want to get it, maybe? | ||
| He basically said something to the effect of that porn should be illegal and that we should jail pornographers. | ||
| Later in the thread, I think he said that to somebody who was like, let me be clear, so we should jail the pornographers and the people who make it? | ||
| And he's like, yes, absolutely. | ||
| Okay, so now he's a conservative, he works for the Daily Wire, I know you like Ben, I like Ben, so let's, this isn't about the Daily Wire, it's not even about Matt specifically, but it sparked like a four or five day war on Twitter, but it was really, It was intellectually really interesting because it really did show the difference between conservatives and libertarians. | ||
| Where libertarians, it's always about the maximum amount of personal freedom. | ||
| That's the part that I usually, the side that I lean towards. | ||
| And then for conservatives, it's about conserving some traditions that over time seem to build a healthy, in their minds, build a healthy society with some sort of traditional values. | ||
| My real belief would be that classical liberalism is the fusion of those two things. | ||
| But what did you make of that whole debate? | ||
| Because you got into it a little bit. | ||
| I did get into it. | ||
| I sat it out. | ||
| Every now and again, I'm like, I'm gonna sit one out. | ||
| I was gonna sit it out, and then it's hard for me to sit it out coming from Playboy and posting nudity, being me. | ||
| Your boobs are on the internet. | ||
| My boobs are on the internet. | ||
| It's hard for me to sit that one out. | ||
| We just lost 90% of the people watching this because they just went to find me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come back! | |
| That's interesting. | ||
| The reason that I kind of waded into it and I don't even know if I can... | ||
| I just think, again, one of the factory settings that I was taught was that I grew up with the party of family values, you know, the conservative family values, and then there were cracks in that. | ||
| That's not what you grew up in, but that's what you grew up thinking they were. | ||
| No, that's what I grew up believing and witnessing, you know, it was like all about the moral majority, and those were the years that I kind of came, I remember hearing snippets about that. | ||
| We are Gen Xers, old-timers. | ||
| We are. | ||
| For YouTubers. | ||
| God, we're dinosaurs. | ||
| We are dinosaurs. | ||
| We're pretty much like one, ten years away from getting OK Boomer'd. | ||
| And I just, so I grew up with that impression that they were the ones who were very much about the traditional family and then You know, you started seeing the cracks with the evangelicals and a lot of the controversies and the scandals that came out of that. | ||
| And then with Trump being elected and his history, I'm like, you guys don't really get to make that argument. | ||
| You can't defend Trump as your president on principle and also say porn is destroying America. | ||
| I'm sorry, that's a cognitive dissonance that you guys have to deal with. | ||
| And so I did wade into it because to me it just feels like you're like a very pro-Trump and people can say, well I can separate his actions from his from his private life or whatever. | ||
| But these are the same people that are screaming at Bill Clinton. | ||
| So no, you can't. | ||
| Right, so as someone that used to write for Playboy, someone that does have their boobs out there, | ||
| do you like the word boobs? | ||
| What should I be, knockers? | ||
| Boobs or the W, beabs. | ||
| Beabs, is that a thing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The beabs. | |
| But for someone that, okay, your boobs are on the internet, | ||
| you've written for Playboy, so you know this world. | ||
| What would you say? | ||
| So a lot of the arguments, the anti-porn arguments that I saw were that it is fundamentally just destroying, | ||
| we can remove the viewer for a second, but the people that are in it, | ||
| the amount of them that become drug addicts, that are 18 years old and just need any money | ||
| so they do all kinds of things. | ||
| Do you find any of that argument compelling or anything there? | ||
| And again, I'll say, and I said this when I was talking about the porn, the porn online. | ||
| Now you became a baby boomer. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a boomer. | ||
| The porn on the internet. | ||
| As someone who wrote for Playboy and had my DMs open before I couldn't leave them open anymore, I had thousands of emails from men who were talking about their struggle with porn. | ||
| Putting the argument that porn, I see it as a substance though, in the same way that, I mean, I had a porn addiction for a hot minute. | ||
| And it was when I was trying to quit all the other things, I think I just replaced it with porn. | ||
| And it is, I do think that it desensitizes you in a certain way. | ||
| and it does make you numb. | ||
| It does make things more confusing and with the opposite sex or the same sex | ||
| or whomever you're having sex with now in this day and age, like whatever, I don't care. | ||
| So that is one argument, but I would treat it the same way that I would treat alcohol and weed | ||
| and I have a more libertarian view on it. | ||
| That is not for the government to regulate, because the argument the conservatives were making is that the government should come in and regulate this and ban it, essentially. | ||
| And I don't share that that's the solution. | ||
| I think that just pushes things underground, it makes it more dangerous for people in the industry, and it makes it more enticing for people because now it's the thing that's not allowed. | ||
| Why that argument feels kind of thin and where maybe 30 years ago or 20 years ago It would have felt bigger is that 20 20 or 30 years ago like VHS tapes you want to get into porn you probably had to work force You know you to work for a studio right or what you to move out to the valley But but You were in more of like an institution where the opportunities were there for people to abuse you, where now it's like, there are people that make gajillion dollars literally just sitting in their bedroom with a webcam with no middle man. | ||
| It's just a direct interaction with somebody else. | ||
| So it almost feels like it's a little cleaner or something. | ||
| I don't know if that's all fully true, obviously. | ||
| I'm not an expert in the economics of porn, but like something to that maybe? | ||
| Well, and it's the, you know, Well, because then you start wading into the idea of sex work, so you're talking about, if you're talking about people who are making it, whether, are you a cam girl, are you something like me who shows her boob? | ||
| What's the spectrum? | ||
| A political boob girl, you know? | ||
| Are we gonna arrest the cam girl, the e-thoughts? | ||
| You know, every girl that shows her butt on Instagram? | ||
| Wait, what's e-thoughts? | ||
| Am I just gonna say... An e-thought? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, what is that? | |
| It's like e-thot and thought is that hoe over there. | ||
| It's internet slang, but e-thoughts are, I've been accused of being an e-thought, but I'm an e-thought that was sent, I mean, this is the stuff I get from the right wing, is that I'm a deep state plant sent to undermine the conservative party. | ||
| Oh, I get plenty of that. | ||
| That's what I'm doing with the conservatives. | ||
| Yeah, because of conservative ink, you know, Ben Shapiro and the far right can't stand these. | ||
|
unidentified
|
These tolerant conservatives, that's the irony. | |
| But just real quick on that, though, That to me shows you why something good has happened with the conservatives, because when the far-right elements start attacking them now, they go on the attack, where on the left, when the far-left elements attack, they seem to always move towards them now. | ||
| They sort of bow to them, where on the right, when people have attacked Shapiro and Charlie Kirk and people that I would say are more mainstream conservative, they actually fight back and they say, no, if you want a, White nationalist state you're you're the bad guy. | ||
| You're the one that's counter to America where the left seems to always be if the if the bad guys out here They always follow him out there. | ||
| Yeah, and I don't even I'm not sure if it's um You know the I guess bad guys. | ||
| It's it's that the horseshoe theory is like a perfect circle now and Well, the Richard Spencer thing was the perfect example of that. | ||
| Joy Behar, ultimate lefty, suddenly on the same side as Richard Spencer. | ||
| You know, Spencer, far righty, ba-boom. | ||
| I get emails. | ||
| I got one the other day. | ||
| It said, this is a fight for, you know, you sitting on both sides while the fight for America. | ||
| And it was like this tirade against me and how, you know, no one's gonna remember anyone who laughed while the world burned or something. | ||
| And I was like, well, lucky for you, I don't wanna be remembered. | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| So I'm cool with that. | ||
| But I could not tell you who it was from. | ||
| I couldn't tell you if it was from the far left or the far right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I posted, and even, it was a good, it was nice to see my followers | ||
| were a little mixed on this too, because I posted what it said, | ||
| and somebody was, everybody was like, "That's obviously from the right. | ||
| "That's obviously from the left." | ||
| So whatever you believe is the way you perceive that too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a little bit, it's bananas being, when you are kind of in that space, | ||
| you're like, "Whoa, what?" | ||
| It is a mirror. | ||
| Somebody the other day on Twitter said that the American flag should be the Spider-Man pointing at the other Spider-Man meme that goes around, where it's like, you! | ||
| Yeah, that's funny. | ||
| All right, let's shift a little bit here because let's talk about big tech because you've got an interesting announcement coming. | ||
| But just relative to the whole big tech conversation and as someone that you now you might be shadow banned on YouTube and we don't know if they're gonna get us and shadow banning as I keep Endlessly repeating is now quite literally in the Twitter terms of service if you are an American It doesn't apply to the Europeans for some reason But if you're an American it is now in the terms of service on Twitter that they can throttle who sees Your tweets on top of that. | ||
| I just saw as of the day. | ||
| We're taping this today That they're gonna they're considering doing a tip thing on Twitter. | ||
| Yeah Have you heard about this? | ||
| But think how dangerous that means. | ||
| That's an interesting idea, but now they're also saying they can throttle you, but then that means they can also not just control whose information gets out there, but who can actually make money, too. | ||
| So it's a seriously dangerous thing. | ||
| All that being said, when it comes to big tech, as someone that's in this as a creator and a YouTuber and a Twitter and a boob person and all that stuff, where are you on regulation and what we should do about this thing that's obviously pretty intimate? | ||
| To you. | ||
| So, I had to think a lot about this, and I was always, that was one area, it just intersects with a lot of my interests, is big tech, free speech, and like, oh, this is gonna be real interesting in the future, and we'll see how well that holds up, because free markets, big tech, and free speech often do not, you know, get along very well, because they have an interest to their, obviously, to their investors, and, Then you have things happening on Patreon, like the actual financial backings, like Mastercard kind of putting the pressure on to boot people. | ||
| And now there's so many different topics, but I don't believe everyone has a right to a platform. | ||
| So I just, I don't think that everyone has a right to free speech in America, in the places where you are allowed to have free speech. | ||
| That doesn't mean that a private- Meaning the public square. | ||
| Meaning the public square. | ||
| Now that doesn't mean that a private company owes you a microphone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So what about the people that say, but Twitter and Facebook and YouTube are the avenues we communicate. | ||
| And if you're not allowed on there, it's like saying to somebody 30 years ago, you can't get a telephone in your house. | ||
| You know, what's interesting to me is that it's generally people, um, On the left who are saying this, or on the right who are getting kind of throttled, but on the left it's like, get them all off, ban them all, it's not the public square. | ||
| But I think that it hurts really marginalized people the most. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| The trickle down. | ||
| And so, I don't know, to not consider it the public square is dangerous in some ways, because then you are really, it's like, But it's just so crazy to me. | ||
| It goes to show how you're not gay because you don't think the right way. | ||
| Someone isn't black if they don't think the right way. | ||
| It's the ideology. | ||
| So if you have the right ideology, you'll be allowed in the public square. | ||
| Well, that's not the public square. | ||
| But it is weird with Facebook and all these places because As far as I'm concerned, just being that they're private companies, even if they were smart enough to create a public square, they still get to do what they want to do. | ||
| I mean, I don't know what else to say about that. | ||
| That sucks. | ||
| The best line I heard on this, and this was in the middle of me trying to figure out how I wanted to fight this battle, was everyone always says, but this time, they have so much power that it's different. | ||
| So the idea would be that this time, you libertarians, you kind of have to, you have to put it aside and let the government do it because this is, because Google has so much information, so much, this is the time. | ||
| And then Yoron Brookway I've had on. | ||
| Have you chatted with Yoron? | ||
| You should definitely have him on from the Ayn Rand Institute. | ||
| Basically, I mean, it's the most simple thing, but he said it so plainly as if it was nothing that it really just struck me. | ||
| He's like, well, if you wouldn't have principles when they're the hardest time to have those principles, then you don't really have them. | ||
| And so he's completely against regulation. | ||
| So that leads me to why over the last year, and I just announced it barely a month ago, I started Locals.com to allow creators to own everything that they're doing, own all your content, own all of your user data, set whatever rules you want in your Locals. | ||
| We started mine, which we have about 10,000 people in there now, at RubinReport.com, and we got an iOS app and a Google Play app. | ||
| But I'm not pimping myself out here, Bridget. | ||
| Because this all leads to that. | ||
| We're pimping my boobs out. | ||
| No, just kidding. | ||
| We are pimping Bridget's boobs. | ||
| No, that you, this is the first time it's being said publicly, you are the first creator on Locals. | ||
| People can go to Phetasy.com today, P-H-E-T-S-A-Y. | ||
| No, A-S-Y. | ||
| Wait, Phetasy, P-H-E-T-A-S-Y. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Yeah, is that not what I said? | ||
| No, you said it S-A-Y. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's fine, it's confusing. | ||
| A little dyslexia there. | ||
| We'll put it on the screen. | ||
| But you are the first creator beyond me that is on Locals.com and we're super psyched to have you there. | ||
| I'm honored. | ||
| And we had literally about 5,000 people that reached out within that first couple weeks to create communities and I was like, Bridget's the right one because you are just in the center of all of this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So I'm thrilled to tell everybody that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm honored to be here. | |
| I'm so excited. | ||
| I'm excited because well, there's a couple many reasons one you put your money where your mouth is You know a lot of I appreciate that a lot of people when I was I was too small to really I was affected by people like Jordan and you and Sam leaving patreon because you took a lot of people who who subscribed to me and No, I had my own friends angry at me that were like, Dave, you left and it's okay, but people canceled their Patreon accounts because of us, so then a lot of you guys got hurt. | ||
| Yeah, it's fine, whatever. | ||
| And again, I really don't like to be the victim-y thing, so even, I'm like, all right, Shadowban me, all right, whatever, I'll figure out a way, because I always have. | ||
| You actually did figure out a way and made something, and a lot of people are like, well, go make your own internet. | ||
| You're like, okay, fine, I will go make my own, you know, it's not a platform though, is it? | ||
| Well, it's a non-platform platform. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a creator-specific platform. | ||
| It's different. | ||
| And one of the cool things that we're going to be launching over the next couple of months now that we're adding some creators, and you're just the first of a whole bunch of people that we're going to add, is that we're going to be able to connect our communities. | ||
| So you'll be able to connect your community with like-minded people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dave and Bridget like each other will connect our communities. | ||
| It'll strengthen our feeds and our fans will be able to communicate with each other. | ||
| And if one day you're like, that Dave Rubin's a real asshole, you'll just disconnect the connection and that's it. | ||
| And the idea was, let's give all of the power back to the creators and make sure that the day that you say something on Dumpster Fire that YouTube's like, we're done with this girl. | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| You don't have any of, I mean, think how many subscribers do you have? | ||
| on YouTube ballpark? | ||
| Oh, I mean, I've only been on for like three months, so 11,000 about? | ||
| All right, great. | ||
| The day that they find you too much of a threat or whatever, and hopefully by the end of this show, we're gonna send some subscribers your way, but the point is that you have no way of communicating with those 11,000 people. | ||
| They've chosen to subscribe to your channel, but you can't get your message out to them because the algorithm sits between you And getting a message out to them. | ||
| I wish I had my phone on me. | ||
| You get actual push notifications on your phone. | ||
| So I think we've built something pretty cool. | ||
| And I'm very happy that you're part of it. | ||
| I'm so excited. | ||
| I'm excited. | ||
| I was telling David that I cried when I saw it. | ||
| My David. | ||
| Yes, your David. | ||
| That I cried when I saw it, because it's just Phetasy. | ||
| I made up the word Phetasy years ago, and it means when reality becomes parody. | ||
| Now in 2006, this didn't mean anything. | ||
| And now it's like the culture has kind of caught up to the word and then because social media was so new, | ||
| I used it as my social media name because A, I didn't really trust social media | ||
| and knew nothing about it. | ||
| And I didn't, and I wanted to get the word out. | ||
| Well, I inadvertently became the brand before my company did | ||
| because my company went bankrupt because I was 27 and didn't have a business plan. | ||
| I was going to make greeting cards. | ||
| Again, trying to just be a voice for people I felt like didn't have a voice, which was divorce people and people who had kids out of wedlock. | ||
| And that's where I started, and then it took on a whole other life of its own, which is a crazy journey and probably the book I should write. | ||
| And then I saw it, just Phetasy back with the original logo, and I'm like, I never gave up on this! | ||
| I have it on my phone. | ||
| It's the test version. | ||
| Yeah, and Phetasy was always meant to be a content creation. | ||
| That's all I wanted. | ||
| I wanted to be a production company. | ||
| Like I said, I have scripted podcasts I want to make. | ||
| I have locals-only content that I want to put on, and I see locals now, or the Phetasy locals, as my hub where I get to do that and just keep expanding and collecting people as long as I'm allowed in the public forums. | ||
| But it's the home, I mean, what I'm trying to tell people is it's your digital home. | ||
| You do whatever you want in your digital home. | ||
| You can't, you know, our TOS, our Terms of Service, you can't break the laws of the United States across the board on locals. | ||
| But beyond that, one of the cool things is you set the rules in your locals. | ||
| I set the rules in my locals. | ||
| So if someone's just being purely evil in mind, I just don't want your money and goodbye, you're out. | ||
| You may have a different policy related to what you do. | ||
| Yeah, mine's pretty much the same. | ||
| Yeah, and mine is sort of, I wrote it in a kind of funny way. | ||
| It's like, it's not that I have three strikes, it's just like, don't be a relentless dick. | ||
| And if you just can't do that, then I don't want, I literally don't want your money. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's how I feel. | ||
| I call it my gated community. | ||
| Yeah, congratulations. | ||
| Well, the new institutions are being built. | ||
| What do you think, though, because we're doing this as a subscription thing, about That maybe the day of the absolutely free internet being the main driving force of everything is kind of done, because that's sort of what I'm feeling. | ||
| Like, yes, I get it. | ||
| I'm not leaving YouTube or Twitter or any of those things for discovery. | ||
| They're not free, though. | ||
| Well, they just stole your soul. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I always say on Twitter. | ||
| I'm like, Twitter takes your soul and all your information. | ||
| So one of the things I love about yours is that I take that stuff. | ||
| I have no interest in selling information people give me to third parties, none. | ||
| I don't like it when other places do that to me. | ||
| I have no interest in that. | ||
| If I shut down and die, it all dies with me. | ||
| That's also very clearly written for my partners. | ||
| I don't want them taking it and selling it. | ||
| it. And I just, I think that the, you know, I was saying, as I was watching all of the | ||
| past couple of years, the debates and the siloing of public and private opinion is happening anyway. | ||
| And I was saying, everyone's going to end up going back to their domain names. Everybody left | ||
| their domain names to go into these, you know, social media places. And now everyone's going to | ||
| start kind of reverting back to those places, their homes, their home pages. | ||
| Do you think that that's part of the problem? | ||
| You found a way to link them all and be social, so it's the future, it's amazing. | ||
| I'm psyched about what you did. | ||
| No, it's amazing. | ||
| I mean, when you guys showed me the demo, I was like, I got in the car with cousin Maggie, | ||
| and we were like, this is the future. | ||
| 'Cause it's social media meets content creation. | ||
| It's like Patreon meets Twitter a little bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it scrolls and it's sexy. | ||
| It's just, I'm so excited. | ||
| Well, it's also like, I wanted to, you know, people, everyone that comes, this is my house, and everyone that comes in here, I always repeat the story, but like Tucker Carlson, who's the number one guy in cable news who probably makes $15 million a year or something insane, he literally opened up the door to my garage I don't know if he would want me fully saying what he said, but he basically said, holy fucking shit, you did it right. | ||
| Meaning I'm free, I built this thing and I feel like I've now done enough to now give the tools to some other people to do those things. | ||
| And if you leave Locals, congratulations, it's all your data. | ||
| We don't keep it. | ||
| We keep the ad handle just in case someone wants to stay on another local, | ||
| but we don't keep that data. | ||
| You can go and do whatever you want with it and all that good stuff. | ||
| Yeah, it's exciting. | ||
| I think it's, I just love the, it's in line with my principles of free speech | ||
| and free markets and being an independent content creator. | ||
| And I do think, like you were saying, that the future, I mean, right now it's subscriber and my kind of entry level might be a little bit higher than I'd like just because that's for my own ability. | ||
| But I think the future... What do you mean? | ||
| You mean your tier? | ||
| My entry level to locals is $5. | ||
| I'd like to get to the point where so many millions of people know about me that it's $2 and they get all this cool content because there's just more awareness. | ||
| Because I think the future probably is people finding those creators that they like and spending their money instead of on a cable package, which is a total rip. | ||
| Yeah, you're paying 180 bucks for literally 182 channels that you don't watch. | ||
| Yeah, maybe for live sports, which again, they're all going, you can watch those on Twitter. | ||
| You can pay two bucks to somebody like me and three bucks to someone else you like, and you have your little media budget for that kind of content. | ||
| What do you think about just generally We thought that social media and all of this stuff was gonna bring us community, but what it brought, like it helped a lot of us succeed, right? | ||
| So we're living examples of the good part of this. | ||
| But what it also brought was a certain amount of endless anxiety, and the sky is falling, and everything's horrible, and everyone hates each other, and you said it before, but then you can close your computer and it's fine. | ||
| And that's what I wanted to bridge. | ||
| That was the divide I wanted to bridge, between the good stuff that's online, And then also figure out some real world stuff. | ||
| So like, I was in San Francisco. | ||
| I would never tweet where I am, because God only knows who's gonna show up. | ||
| But I did put it on my local, knowing that these are paying people, and about 20 people showed up within a half hour in San Francisco, and we all had drinks, and it was awesome, and it was like, oh. | ||
| That's why you do kind of have to like, make it cost prohibitive to keep the riffraff on. | ||
| And look, there's no perfect system, right? | ||
| There's no perfect system, because someone might pay you to do all that. | ||
| To just troll you, yeah. | ||
| They might, but then it's up to you. | ||
| Then either you take their money or you just, or you don't, but it's up to you. | ||
| You make a good point about the community. | ||
| One of the things I've seen, I fostered a kind of community in Patreon, and when I was going through hard times this year, which there were a couple, the community showed up for me in a way and I watched them show up for each other when somebody said they were depressed and you know they felt safe in that community because there weren't all of these onlookers and I have been introduced to people like so many people I joke that my my podcast should be called all my friends are from Twitter because I've made so many friends and been exposed to so many ideas and and I have my ideas challenged and I don't think that | ||
| I see so much good in it and I feel so grateful to live in America. | ||
| I feel I just am kind and again this is a lot of recovery. | ||
| It's pretty awesome lady. | ||
| It's it's also just I wake up I'm like I'm so lucky. | ||
| I'm just I feel very lucky for the most part and I do want to help other people and I see how | ||
| crazy everyone's going. | ||
| So leading into the election and then whatever happens post-election I really want my | ||
| locals community to feel like they can challenge each other, push back, have reasonable conversations, | ||
| not be mean, not personal, no personal attacks, but also support each other and their goals for | ||
| the for the future, their goals for one of the people who's in my community. | ||
| He's like a brilliant businessman. | ||
| He's been mentoring other people in my community. | ||
| It's just so wonderful to see. | ||
| Well, by the way, we should give a shout out to our man Warren. | ||
| I don't know if he wants us to say his last name. | ||
| Zen Pro Audio. | ||
| Yeah, so Warren from Zen Pro Audio. | ||
| He owns his own audio company. | ||
| Warren was one of my first supporters, I mean, years and years and years ago. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| And Warren, all of my, I know you know this, but all of my audio stuff, the labs that we're wearing, all of the soundproofing. | ||
| He donated all of it, on top of being a supporter for years, and he's a big supporter of yours also, so I feel like we should give him a little shout out. | ||
| But related to community and all that, do you think that people will say, oh, but Dave, you're going to just silo yourself? | ||
| Right, it's a bubble. | ||
| It's your safe space. | ||
| You know, I was thinking about this on the way over because that is what's happening anyway, so I believe... Right, as if the people saying it aren't doing it to themselves. | ||
| And I go out of my way to challenge myself, so automatically if I read something and it confirms my bias, whatever that might be, or if I feel that like, I'm dubious of it. | ||
| You know, I'm suspicious of it. | ||
| Now, this comes, A, from not trusting myself, really, and my own thoughts and beliefs from kind of being an addict. | ||
| But, B, I think it's just good to train yourself to know what your biases are and know that when you're being flattered, you should be suspicious. | ||
| This is also just like a Zen thing. | ||
| To, it's our responsibility, you know, somebody, we had this discussion the other day and it was a really good question. | ||
| Someone in an audience said, where do you get your news? | ||
| What is your trusted news source? | ||
| People ask me this all the time and what I always say is you can't, you already said this actually at the beginning of the interview, but you can't trust institutions anymore. | ||
| You can basically figure out a couple people to trust. | ||
| So there are some journalists, not even journalists, I don't even know what they are anymore, there's some personalities that I basically think are good faith actors. | ||
| who I think are worth following, but there's very few. | ||
| I just saw literally, right before we started, that Lee Lessig, who he was gonna run as an independent a couple years ago, just run on campaign finance reform, and then he said he's a tech guy, and he was gonna self-fund his campaign. | ||
| He ended up not going anywhere with it. | ||
| But I just saw that he's suing the New York Times. | ||
| for libel because they wrote this ridiculous hit piece on him and then I looked at the byline of who he's suing | ||
| and it's the same author who wrote the hit piece about enforcement agony on Jordan Peterson | ||
| and who wrote the ridiculous piece last week on PragerU that they're circumventing parents and teachers. | ||
| Why was I telling you that related to all of this? | ||
| There was some reason there, and I completely lost it in the midst of that. | ||
| Oh, trusted news sources. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| You can't just say, oh, the New York Times is good because my dad used to like it when it was good. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And obviously I'm no fan of this particular author. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Her name may not be mentioned, but that's the point. | ||
| You can't just trust the institution anymore, but that's not to say that there isn't a good egg at the New York Times. | ||
| I'm not quite sure who it is, but there's gotta be somebody there. | ||
| No, they still do some amazing journalism, and I don't like to shit on all journalists. | ||
| But isn't that in some ways the suckier part? | ||
| When they do something good, because they do so much bad now, that then they do something good, and then your ability to... | ||
| Or do we just only hear about the bad? | ||
| Because I think journalists, you know, I don't, I don't, I definitely don't want to demonize journalists in the mainstream media, or journalists, journalists and journalism, I feel like, is very important to democracy. | ||
| And so... That's why I demonize the bad ones. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because they're journalists, as I like to say. | ||
| It's like they're activists posing as journalists, which is dangerous to democracy. | ||
| Also dangerous to democracy is calling every single journalist an enemy of the people. | ||
| So finding good faith actors is increasingly harder, and I also think I read everything. | ||
| I try to read left, right, center, libertarian, just because I feel like somewhere in there I can form my own opinion. | ||
| And I've become like a psycho about, okay, I'll read this headline. | ||
| What's my gut instinct? | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Read the article. | ||
| Oh, that quote's completely taken out of context. | ||
| All right, let's read the study. | ||
| Oh, who made the study? | ||
| But I have time to do that. | ||
| Most people don't have time, nor even desire, they just see the headline, it confirms what they believe, and they're like, yeah! | ||
| So does that put more pressure on you in a way? | ||
| Because I feel that too, is that because life seems to be getting faster, the digital age is making information consumption faster, people are living in worlds where you can get your food delivered at the same time that you're doing this, and you're watching this, and you're on your Peloton, and you're doing whatever that woman's doing, and the whole thing. | ||
| In a way, the job of the curator, if that's what we are in a certain way, we're sort of in a world of these relatively trusted people. | ||
| Our job is more important, or not, I don't wanna say more important, it's highly important relative to people being able to make some sense out of the madness. | ||
| Yeah, that's a new pressure that I, I'm not an expert, but I definitely think I also don't just get to say, I'm a nobody and don't know anything. | ||
| Because that's my default. | ||
| Well, sometimes you say that. | ||
| That's the only time I give you shit, right? | ||
| And you rightfully should give me shit, because it's not really... I'm advocating my responsibility, and also, I'm not an expert. | ||
| I only have my confusion to offer. | ||
| That doesn't mean I don't have any knowledge, and it doesn't mean I don't have any insight. | ||
| And it doesn't mean I just get to be like... But also, all the self-professed experts often get everything wrong all the time. | ||
| So I like people who do, and you're gonna make some mistakes along the way. | ||
| I mean, in a weird way, this is like Trump's greatest gift. | ||
| It's not that he's, he's certainly no expert in politics. | ||
| I guess he could be an expert maybe in building, you know, building buildings, building physical structures, or something like that. | ||
| He's not an expert in politics, but he has a gut feel for something that seemingly is sort of right in a certain way, or whatever, wherever you wanna put that. | ||
| In many ways, I get him. | ||
| No, well, that's how I was gonna relate it to you. | ||
| He's very intuitive. | ||
| I understand the way he kinda shoots off the hip, and it's like, he's very intuitive, for sure. | ||
| And people always say, you're like an intuitive political pundit, or like an intuitive pundit, I don't know anything, but I do have a good general sense of, I don't know, like the current or the zeitgeist or whatever. | ||
| But that is a real thing. | ||
| That is a real thing, right? | ||
| I always tweet this thing about how is it possible that Trump, this orange-haired, You know, giant, bloviating, seeming buffoon is more of a real person than the Democratic candidates. | ||
| And then you see Elizabeth Warren dancing up there. | ||
| Yeah, people are so desperate for authenticity that they'll pick an authentic actor. | ||
| asshole over disingenuous, you know, lifetime politicians who have been paid by the government forever. | ||
| And so they don't, there's just a distrust of all our institutions. | ||
| So I think anyone who's being authentic is somebody that people are like, well, I can trust that person. | ||
| Now that might not also be true as well. | ||
| And I was saying to the other day to my, I had someone call and they're like, | ||
| how can you be both sides? | ||
| And this is a family member and she was distraught and crying and like, can't you see the kids in cages? | ||
| And you know, the like repetitive things that I often hear online. | ||
| You mean the system that Obama set up that nobody said anything about at the time? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, that system, yeah. | ||
| And this is what I said. | ||
| I said the hardest thing about this time is evaluating what was true with every administration that is now being demonized because it's Trump and what is something that he's doing completely differently that we need to be aware of and push back against. | ||
| And this is where I will say principled conservatives have been pretty good. | ||
| And there are some who are very consistent, some of the never-Trumpers or whatever, who are lifetime conservatives. | ||
| They might not always be right, but you kind of have to find those people where you're like, okay, this is a left-wing thing. | ||
| Who are the people who push back against the left-wing, and what's their take on it? | ||
| And what's the never-Trumpers' take on this? | ||
| Is this a thing that's always been happening, or is this a thing that is something that You know, we should be concerned about. | ||
| You know, it's funny though, I find the Never Trumpers, even that phrase, I would never want to be defined by what I never am. | ||
| No, I don't think they want to be. | ||
| But it's such a horrible way to define yourself. | ||
| And it also shows why so many of them have seemingly gone crazy. | ||
| More horrible than the intellectual dark web. | ||
| That wasn't the greatest thing ever. | ||
| Well, IDW has a nice ring to it. | ||
| But the idea that you'd say, I'm never Trump, well, that's a real dangerous thing because if he does six out of 10 good things and you're, I'm never Trump, well, now you're wrong six out of 10 times. | ||
| Now you're failing. | ||
| So it's just one of those things. | ||
| I know, and I don't know that a lot of people who get thrown in that camp even consider themselves Nefertrumpers. | ||
| Everybody just wants to be labeled. | ||
| I always just get called Reuben 2.0. | ||
| That's like, everyone's like, remember Ruben two years ago? | ||
| She's gonna be saying the same thing in two years. | ||
| I'm like, well, I hope I have that. | ||
| You mean you're gonna be the leader of the alt-right in two years? | ||
| I hope I have a hot tub. | ||
| That would be pretty good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That would be pretty good. | ||
| All right, Bridget. | ||
| We are gonna send people to Phetasy.com. | ||
| It is the first local that exists beyond the Rubin Report local. | ||
| And I'm super psyched that you're doing it. | ||
| And you're gonna be big, sister. | ||
| I have proclaimed it right here. | ||
| We have a good community. | ||
| There's a lot of people in recovery. | ||
| There's a lot of people who aren't. | ||
| It's just mostly very loving people who are confused and confused. | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| There's so many, you know, I have, it's just so interesting the different kinds of people that I feel, I do feel like if I am in a gated community, in a silo, at least there's still dialogue occurring. | ||
| It's not just all one thing or all the other thing. | ||
| There's still a lot of talk in my silo. | ||
| Wait, and more important than anything else, I hope that you're sharing pictures of Hope, your dog, in there, because mine's very Emma-heavy, and we both are, so Emma, most of my audience knows, at 15 and a half and a year into cancer, we're sort of entering that last phase with her, but I've actually, I've posted some questions about geriatric dogs and palliative care, and I get incredible responses from people about all that kind of stuff, and Hope was going through some stuff with her eye, but she's okay, right? | ||
| Yeah, she's okay. | ||
| Yeah, so you just find strange ways to build community. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that I do believe in... I love people. | ||
| You know, I think that most people, left, right, center, wherever they are, are doing... I think they believe what they're saying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, I don't know that... Doesn't mean they're right. | |
| It doesn't mean their logic is flawed, or isn't flawed. | ||
| I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, because I know that it's hard being human. |
Export Selection