May 18, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
23:55
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I talk about the Larry Elder interview in that, and where after he beat me senseless My editors and my director and my producers wanted to cut it. | ||
| They didn't want it to air. | ||
| And I said, guys, if I'm anything that I purport to be as an interviewer, we have to put it up. | ||
| And, you know, I saw it get clipped a million times on YouTube and Larry Elder destroys, in capital letters, Libtard and, you know, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But what I realized almost within a day was, holy cow, people were having their wake-up moment right alongside of | ||
| me. | ||
|
unidentified
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[MUSIC] | |
| Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan. | ||
| We're here with the Don't Burn This Book book club. | ||
| We're doing chapter five. | ||
| Check your facts, not your privilege, which is a chapter after my own heart. | ||
| I'm very big on facts. | ||
| It reminded me of what Ronald Reagan once said, and he said, it's not that Democrats don't know anything. | ||
| It's that everything they know happens to be untrue. | ||
| And I think that this is something that comes to all of us when we are, as they say, red-pilled. | ||
| When we start to realize that all the things we took for granted, all the positions we took for granted, really aren't based in any kind of facts. | ||
| They're based in a kind of emotional brow-beating that the left uses instead of ideas. | ||
| I mean, this is one of the things about the left. | ||
| They don't have a lot of ideas, but they have a lot of techniques for silencing people with ideas and for frightening people with ideas. | ||
| And I have to say, one of the things I liked about this, this chapter is packed with facts, is packed with information, stuff you can use to beat up your grandmother at Thanksgiving if she has a bad opinion. | ||
| But I think, but I think the most important part of this chapter is the discussion about the fact That when we talk to each other, when liberals and conservatives talk to one another, they are talking in different languages. | ||
| I would go even further in saying they're talking from a completely different point of view. | ||
| So Dave, I'd like to talk to you about that, because that was the thing that really grabbed me, was this idea that we're not communicating at all. | ||
| We think we're arguing with one another, but we're actually not putting across our ideas at all. | ||
| Is that a fair way to say it? | ||
| It is a fair way, and Clavin, before I say anything else, one of the reasons that I wanted you to handle this chapter is because I think you are one of the better communicators we have on these type of ideas, because often it is that lens that is the screwed up part. | ||
| It's hard to tell how people think about the world, where their biases are, and everything else, and I find you to be a very clear communicator on this stuff, and of course you do work with that fast-talking Orthodox Jew who's always talking, what's that thing about facts and feelings? | ||
| There's something that he's always saying about that. | ||
| You're around him a lot, so I thought it would work. | ||
| We can dive into some of the nitty-gritty of the specifics, but I agree that the part about the lenses really is the most interesting part here. | ||
| Some of us view the world, so me for example, I really view the world through mostly what is thought of, in an American sense, as a libertarian lens, that I want you as the individual to basically be able to do whatever you want, but not purely whatever you want. | ||
| You can't infringe on your neighbor's rights, you can't steal from people, you can't murder people, things like that. | ||
| And this is where I always say, people always say, well, Dave, what's the difference between a classical liberal and a libertarian? | ||
| And I always say, well, I want a little bit more of the basic guidelines around society than I think a pure libertarian does. | ||
| And then we have people that view things through more of a conservative lens | ||
| that generally is more that they're trying to defend the family and sort of long fought, | ||
| long fought battles that sort of, they view built Western civilization | ||
| that has sort of fought against barbarism, as they would call it. | ||
| And I actually have become very sympathetic to that view as well. | ||
| And then there's sort of the more progressive, or I think it's really called liberal lens, | ||
| although I always am trying to clean up the difference between sort of progressive and liberal, | ||
| which is more sort of about the oppressed and the oppressor. | ||
| And I think that's the most muddled lens these days, because if you live in the West, | ||
| And especially if you live in the United States, you are not oppressed. | ||
| You have actually the greatest privilege there is, which is that you live in a free society. | ||
| That isn't to say it is perfect. | ||
| We know it is not perfect, but I don't believe a perfect society can exist. | ||
| I think once you try to create a perfect society, you're going to have to take out a lot of people to do it, because people are imperfect. | ||
| So I think that general idea of sort of figuring out how you look at the world, what sort of pecking order you | ||
| put the importance of these things in, is a really important thing. And then, to your point, then | ||
| when you find, "Oh, well, here's someone who looks at the world so differently than me. They | ||
| don't accept facts as I accept facts, or they have what they view to be a completely | ||
| different set of facts." Well, then you can start unpacking that a little bit because you | ||
| can have an appreciation, "Oh, it's just that their hierarchy is a little different than my | ||
| hierarchy, and we have to figure out how how to be able to do some talking here. | ||
| You know, like you, I came over from the left and I shifted over to the right, almost not knowing it, because I was out of the country when it happened. | ||
| I was living in England and I came back and found I had shifted to the right. | ||
| And I had this innocent sense that, oh wow, you know, if only my fellow friends on the left knew what I now knew, they would see that they have made this terrible mistake. | ||
| And I went around explaining To my former friends who now no longer talk to me. | ||
| And when I follow you on Twitter, I see you often saying to people, you know, what you just said is not based in fact or now you're starting to see the facts. | ||
| Why don't you come on my show and we'll talk about it. | ||
| How often do people respond to that? | ||
| How often do you get people who are willing to engage with you in this journey? | ||
| Well, unfortunately, it's becoming less and less because so many of the people on the left, I think have turned from, say, honest debate | ||
| to just personal attacks. | ||
| And I am always willing to open my door, or in this case, my Skype, | ||
| to anyone that wants to talk to me respectfully. | ||
| But if you're endlessly going to attack me or attack my motives or lie about me, you know, there's a certain set of people that will just lie about you relentlessly and then say, see, and you won't bring me on your show. | ||
| And it's like, well, that's not really the game that I'm interested in playing. | ||
| But it is fascinating to me what you're talking about there, which is that you thought, because I think a lot of ex lefties, which, by the way, I think is truly the biggest growing an unspoken political group in the United States. | ||
| It's the decent liberals who are waking up against leftism. | ||
| But I think a lot of them are sort of thinking what you just laid out there, which is, oh, I've woken up to some stuff. | ||
| It clearly is more fact-based and more freeing as a human being. | ||
| And suddenly I'm realizing, oh, these conservatives that I thought were the bad guys or whatever, they're not so bad. | ||
| But they're afraid to say it. | ||
| And not only afraid to say it, they're shocked that people don't start coming with them, but there's a reason for that. | ||
| The reason, of course, is that once you've called everybody else bigots and racists, you know that will be turned against you. | ||
| One other thing to just further your point. | ||
| It's interesting, because I know that you and I have still some pretty significant political disagreements. | ||
| You are pro-life. | ||
| I make a pro-choice argument in this book. | ||
| I think you're for the death penalty, right? | ||
| I'm not for the death penalty as it stands, but I'm potentially for the death penalty. | ||
| Okay, so I'm against the death penalty. | ||
| I've heard some great arguments. | ||
| Dennis Prager makes, I think, a fantastic argument for the death penalty. | ||
| I just don't like the idea of giving the state that much power. | ||
| I'm still for some level of public education. | ||
| I'm for dignity with death. | ||
| You should be able to make choices at the end. | ||
| I'm for legalizing marijuana. | ||
| I mean, we could go into a bunch of things that you and I don't really see eye to eye on, but I think the purpose of this chapter was also to show people People on the right, they're willing to sit there and do it, sit there and debate it, and go through all the grit and the dirt that you have to get to to be able to form a functioning society. | ||
| Unfortunately, that doesn't really exist on the other side. | ||
| You know, you start this chapter, chapter five, check your facts, not your privilege. | ||
| You started with you having a debate with Larry Elder. | ||
| And I did feel sorry for you because that's like shooting a nail gun into your foot. | ||
| You know, I mean, the guy has a real mastery of facts and information. | ||
| But, you know, it was about racism and black people in America, and we're having this conversation on a day when the Pulitzer Prize has been given to the New York Times for a completely dishonest take on slavery and black people, their 1619 project. | ||
| So much of the division between us is keyed around race. | ||
| A lot of it is keyed around gender, but so much of it starts with this idea that somehow we are perpetually in a racist, a state of systemic racism in this country. | ||
| And Larry Elder in your chapter, he basically takes you to task and he says, show me, show me where that racism is. | ||
| The question I get asked more often than any other is how can I convince people that we are not in this state? | ||
| How can I convince people that we can actually become one country despite the color differences? | ||
| Is that something that you feel is possible or are these two different languages just so completely separate that we can't reach across that barrier? | ||
| You know, it's such a great question, and I would say this. | ||
| I don't think I could do what I do, and I suspect you couldn't do what you do if you didn't think it was possible to bridge this divide. | ||
| It would be like, what would we really be doing with our lives? | ||
| Like, why would we be talking about these things if we didn't think that the good ideas could ultimately, you know, conquer the bad ones, or that the sunlight would expose the bad ideas or the rest of it? | ||
| So, you know, I talk about the Larry Elder interview and that, and where, after he beat me senseless, My editors and my director and my producers wanted to cut it. | ||
| They didn't want it to air. | ||
| And I said, guys, if I'm anything that I purport to be as an interviewer, we have to put it up. | ||
| And, you know, I saw it get clipped a million times on YouTube and Larry Elder destroys in capital letters, Libtard and you know, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But what I realized almost within a day was, holy cow, people were having their wake up moment right alongside of me. | ||
| So as I write, I don't know how many people in our Biz or in any business can say, you know, my best and worst professional moment were at the exact same time. | ||
| But that's truly what happened. | ||
| It was my worst moment because I came to a gunfight not ready, with no weapon attached, because I just thought, oh, I say things and that's what lefties do. | ||
| That it's sort of just because you say it, it is right. | ||
| Systemic racism exists. | ||
| It is right. | ||
| America is racist. | ||
| It's divinely right in and of itself. | ||
| So it was my worst moment because of that, but it was my best because in the face of it, once I got countered, I don't know where it came from exactly, but I showed some humility and I let it be a learning experience for other people. | ||
| But to directly answer your question about can we get through this, I think there's a lot of people that in many ways don't want us to get through this. | ||
| There's a lot of people that thrive on keeping racial tension stoked and it's the anti-racist Who actually are pushing the most racism into society, the supposed anti-racists, who are the ones that are obsessed with our color of our skin and our sexuality and our gender and the rest of it. | ||
| And then it's the other side that just doesn't care about that stuff. | ||
| And then they use it as, oh, you don't care what color someone's skin is? | ||
| You're the racist. | ||
| And it's like, no, that's actually reverse. | ||
| We got to work through this thing. | ||
| Can we get through it? | ||
| I think is like, that's the billion dollar question. | ||
| And I think the answer, if we can wake up enough people, and that's exactly why I wrote the book, if we can wake up enough people to exactly what individual rights are, to why the Constitution is so great, to why America, unlike any other country in the history of the world that not only brought all of these people here to blend in, but also keep their traditions and ethnicity and all of those things, | ||
| But we also expand rights over time, right? | ||
| We had slaves. | ||
| We got rid of it. | ||
| Then black people could vote. | ||
| Women couldn't vote. | ||
| Now they can vote. | ||
| Gay people can get married. | ||
| We've expanded and expanded and expanded rights. | ||
| And I know that it will be my conservative friends who, if in the future, there's some other group of people who don't have equality, equality under the law. | ||
| It doesn't mean you have to morally like them or something like that. | ||
| I know that it will be the liberty-minded people that will defend people's ability to be equal under the law, while it's the lefties who will be sort of using them as a crudgel to gain power. | ||
| And that really is the important distinction. | ||
| You're not just anti-racist because you say you're anti-racist. | ||
| You're anti-racist when you get out of everyone's lives so that they can live whatever their best life is. | ||
| You now find yourself in what I think is the biggest tent, which is the conservative side or the right-wing side, whatever you want to call it, where there are in fact people, as you said yourself, there are people who hold your points of view, but there are people who hold very different points of view. | ||
| And yet, and yet, there is something that is bringing us all together. | ||
| There is something that makes it easy for Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin to be friends, even when they have complete differences of opinions. | ||
| What is the moment? | ||
| You know, you talked about gay marriage and more freedom for gay people. | ||
| I'm old enough, I remember people being literally arrested for being gay. | ||
| You would be the police could go into a gay bar and wait till somebody hit on him and arrest you for that. | ||
| So I actually remember that time and it's a huge, huge change. | ||
| And I personally have been glad to see it. | ||
| But for a while on the right, I was talking to myself for a while. | ||
| I was saying, you know, we're wrong about this. | ||
| We should shift over. | ||
| And it has shifted somewhat, but you're still in this tent with people who strongly disagree with you. | ||
| What is it, do you think, that unites them, that unites you to people that you know | ||
| might have feelings about you, which are not as open as you'd like them to be? | ||
| What is it that unites you now? | ||
| The literal answer is individual rights, That is the bedrock principle of the right. | ||
| Individual rights. | ||
| If you are a member of a society, a legal member of society, then you should be treated equally under the law. | ||
| We are not going to rejigger and reorganize things so that everyone is exactly equal. | ||
| And I've said this many times, but some people are born into more money. | ||
| Some people are born into less. | ||
| Some people are born drug addicted. | ||
| Some people are genuinely luckier in life. | ||
| Some people make their luck. | ||
| Some people work hard. | ||
| Some people don't. | ||
| The lefties are all obsessed with those things. | ||
| Society can't fix those things. | ||
| That's actually impossible. | ||
| That's what the quest of life is about. | ||
| Society can just make it equal. | ||
| So I think that's the literal answer. | ||
| I think the figurative answer is sort of, From an American perspective, I think almost everyone that identifies as a conservative or a libertarian or a classical liberal or let's say a disaffected lefty, I think there's an innate pride in America. | ||
| I am deeply, deeply proud. | ||
| It's not even proud. | ||
| Truly, I thank God that I am an American, that I was born in this country that is the freest place ever. | ||
| You've been to my house and my studio. | ||
| I have a giant American flag sitting in there. | ||
| It's about five foot by eight foot. | ||
| We've got the Constitution and the Bill of Rights on the wall in there, too. | ||
| I'm not doing that for theater. | ||
| These are the greatest man-made documents that have freed us, and I think there is a pride in that. | ||
| That is deeply special on the right. | ||
| And now try to think about what's happening on the left. | ||
| I mean, go through the candidates that ran, you know, the election and the primary seemed like a lifetime ago. | ||
| But it was like, how often were the words liberty or freedom or constitution ever said? | ||
| Ever said. | ||
| I keep telling people, but the one time constitution was said was when Kamala Harris said she would do an executive action on guns and Biden was like, hey, but what about the constitution? | ||
| And she literally laughed in his face. | ||
| I think, like, is Bernie Sanders proud of the American experiment? | ||
| The thing that he says is racist and he basically talks about as some sort of evil thing. | ||
| And that thing, it's dangerous. | ||
| It's actually dangerous. | ||
| It doesn't mean that America is perfect or always right or doesn't make bad decisions or one president is better than the other or something like that. | ||
| But I think the ethos of, let's all be in on this together, and it doesn't matter if your great-grandparents came from Poland and my great-grandparents came from Korea or any other thing. | ||
| It's like if you came here and you work hard, that ethos is strong on the right. | ||
| I'm not sure what the defining thing on the left is anymore. | ||
| When you go through your list of facts in this chapter, you know, you have a hilarious line about the pay gap between men and women saying that the two things that would survive an atomic war would be cockroaches and this idea that there's a pay gap and there's not. | ||
| If there was one fact, if there was just one piece of information that you could stamp onto the forehead of a left-winger that might make him say, oh, you know what, I gotta rethink this. | ||
| What would it be? | ||
| What was the start for you that made you think, hey, wait a minute, you know, I've really got this wrong. | ||
| What's the string that pulls the suit apart? | ||
| You know, I think that the string for me was that the rubber started meeting the road. | ||
| It wasn't just that I was waking up to these ideas and talking to interesting thinkers. | ||
| So like when I talked to Thomas Sowell and we talked about economics, here's a guy who has been railing, you know, sort of against leftism and communism and socialism for his whole life, although he was a Marxist at one time in his life. | ||
| And we talk about that too. | ||
| So this is another guy who was a lefty like us and then who evolved into something else. | ||
| But I think what happened was, as I started talking about these things more and bringing in more people with a diverse set of views, at the same time, I was also building a business here. | ||
| And then when I would hear about why low taxes and getting rid of regulation and these things are important, and then I'd start looking at the numbers and talking to my business manager and my accountant and everything else and realizing, man, we live, I mean, Andrew, you and I live in a state that is obscenely high taxed. | ||
| Just in the last week, because of corona, I've been sort of half joking about it, but it's becoming less of a joke, | ||
| you know, thinking about maybe it is time to get out of California. | ||
| And we were crunching some numbers, and it's like the amount that I would save | ||
| in a place like Florida or Texas or Washington or South Dakota, I mean the places that have | ||
| basically zero income tax, and it's not because I want a yacht | ||
| although I would be perfectly within my right to have a yacht, | ||
| It's not that I want a yacht. | ||
| We only have one car between the two of us. | ||
| It's not that I want more stuff, but I know if my company is taxed less, if you get regulation out of the way, what can I do? | ||
| You know what I would do? | ||
| I would hire more people. | ||
| We just hired a new associate producer in the middle of coronavirus because our business is doing well, and if you allow the government to get out of the way and allow you to keep what you earn, I'm pretty sure that everyone watching this Knows what to do with their money better than the government does. | ||
| So if so, I would say the one thing is when you get to that moment, because it will happen, you know, we can talk about all this stuff at the idea level, low taxes, states rights, all of these things. | ||
| But if you live your life sort of congruently with that, if you live your life where you're trying to apply your ideals into your life, at some point it will click, and then suddenly there will be a real moment right in front of you where you'll be like, holy cow, the stuff that I've been talking about, here are the papers, here are the numbers, and it's in front of me, and now I know that I'm not just saying it, I'm living it. | ||
| I gotta ask you one last question, because I have to know this. | ||
| The first time I was on your show was right after I think Donald Trump was elected, and you asked me about Donald Trump, and I told you that I had this fear that there was a 5% chance that he might be Adolf Hitler, but in that other 95% chance, he was much better than Hillary Clinton. | ||
| To me, he's turned out to be a really good president. | ||
| He's done a very good job. | ||
| He reminds me of the kind of boss you have who you sometimes don't like, but he knows how to run the business. | ||
| And I think that that's a kind of interesting thing. | ||
| Politically, you know, you've changed thought philosophically. | ||
| I've watched you change philosophically. | ||
| Have you changed politically? | ||
| Is there a point where you start to say, you know what, I'm going to put my vote where my philosophy is, even if it means voting for someone like Trump that I don't like that much? | ||
| Yeah, oh man, this is the big finish on this one, Clavin. | ||
| Good question. | ||
| So first off, let me give you credit on something else, because I was also with you. | ||
| I was with the Daily Wire guys the night of the election, and you said something that I have quoted it a million times because I think it was so on point. | ||
| Everyone was shocked about what was happening. | ||
| And you said, you know, what a beautiful thing in America that it shows you the flexibility of our system, that the thing that everyone said couldn't happen, that every pollster, every expert, everyone on TV, every pundit, that the thing that they just said couldn't happen just happened. | ||
| What an incredible society we live in, that that sort of thing could happen. | ||
| Freedom is so much more fun, yeah. | ||
| How much more fun and all of that stuff. | ||
| And that's not even, you weren't even commenting on Trump specifically. | ||
| You were just saying like, the reality of what just happened is so beautiful. | ||
| To answer your question, I will tell you this. | ||
| So I am a registered Democrat in this state because there is so much Democrat power in this state, and I wanted to be able to vote in the primaries. | ||
| So I voted for Joe Biden, excuse me, in the primaries, but it was really just a vote against Bernie. | ||
| That was what I viewed as this truly dangerous set of ideas. | ||
| Biden, it was sort of like, eh, Just take the vote. | ||
| You know, something like that. | ||
| But I will tell you this. | ||
| I voted against every single measure in there that increased taxes. | ||
| Every single thing. | ||
| And you have to read them, and they're completely confusing. | ||
| And they say things like, you know, $500 million more for education. | ||
| And if you just look at the headline, you're like, well, of course I want more education. | ||
| And then you have to read, read, read, read, read, and on the bottom it says, and this will be intact for nine years and then only can be repealed by vote. | ||
| But no one ever votes to take education away. | ||
| You just always vote to put more money into it. | ||
| So I would say, in effect, I have no party. | ||
| I don't think having a party is actually that important. | ||
| There's a functional utility to having a party in states where you can only vote in a primary by one party. | ||
| But I don't consider myself a Democrat. | ||
| I don't consider myself a Republican. | ||
| Do I have far more in common with Republicans? | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| And to directly answer your question, I would say at this point, I've done a lot, I think, to save the word liberal. | ||
| I think I've really tried, and I've been one of the people that have really tried to save it so that a guy like you or a guy like Ben Shapiro could say, yeah, in the true sense, I'm a classical liberal, and that really is modern conservatism. | ||
| So I would say more than anything else, in a way, I'm a modern conservative. | ||
| If conservatism is what I now believe it to be, that it isn't that you have to buy all of these ideas, but you can have some outlier ideas, but basically believe in the bedrock principles of America, Then I would say I'm a modern conservative. | ||
| And I would just say one other thing, which is that defending my liberal principles has become a conservative position. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| I always say that, too. | ||
| I always say I'm a conservative because I'm a liberal. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Don't burn this book. | ||
| It's terrific. | ||
| And I'm glad to see that more people are buying it than are burning it, though I know there are a lot of liberals who just want to cross out the first word of the title. | ||
| But it's always great to talk to you, Dave. | ||
| Thanks a lot. | ||
| Clavin, thanks for doing this. | ||
| And I know you're back on the show, I think in June. | ||
| We're doing it in person, regardless of what Eric Garcetti says. | ||
| What do you say about that? | ||
| I will be there with my big black mask on. | ||
| You'll see me. | ||
| Thank you, my friend. | ||
| Thanks a lot. |
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