Oct. 21, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
14:31
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So it was a little bit funny because after, of course, the Trump rally about a month later, the pandemic really hit. | ||
| And not too long after that, we had the George Floyd incident in Minneapolis. | ||
| And after that, critical race theory really started taking over my entire industry. | ||
| I had just been doing trainings with organizations about how to be better managers and how to communicate with each other and interpersonal communication and all that good stuff. | ||
| Well, critical race theory came in and took over absolutely Every single thing, and the results that I've seen have just really, they've emphasized why critical race theory is not a good direction to go in. | ||
| it's harming individuals, it's harming team cohesion, it's harming organizational productivity, | ||
| and yet organizations all over the country are spending thousands, tens of thousands, | ||
| some of them millions of dollars on this training that has absolutely no | ||
| foundational evidence to support its effectiveness. | ||
| It's Locals Week here on the Rubin Report and I'm doing a series of mini interviews with creators | ||
| on why they decided to become less reliant on big tech and instead own their content, | ||
| community, and livelihood with Locals.com. | ||
| Joining me today is an organizational therapist and knitter turned fearless political fighter, Karlyn Borysenko. | ||
| Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I am glad to have you back on, because although we're going to talk obviously a bit about Locals and why you're on there, you really have become sort of a fearless political fighter, and a year ago you weren't in this game at all. | ||
| You were a simple private person, a knitter, and now look at you. | ||
| You know, life is funny, Dave. | ||
| You never quite know what it's gonna throw at you, but it's been a wild ride and I'm enjoying it. | ||
| Yeah, so for people that don't know you, we'll link to the full interview that we did below. | ||
| And in effect, you went to a Trump rally thinking you were gonna be at a white supremacist rally, and it turned out that you were surrounded by a lot of nice people and now you've become a big part of the walk away campaign and the rest of it. | ||
| How are you feeling about the world at the moment? | ||
| You know, I mean, it is touch and go, isn't it? | ||
| There are some days I'm like, we are all incredibly doomed. | ||
| And there are some days that I just have so much faith and confidence in the direction that we're going in. | ||
| You know, I've been traveling around the country for the past couple of months doing walkaway rallies all over the place. | ||
| And I've gotten to meet so many amazing people. | ||
| I've gotten to meet a lot of conservatives, a lot of Republicans, but also a lot of people just like us who have walked away from the left and, you know, their energy and It's a different vibe when you're in the walkaway community. | ||
| Everyone is happy. | ||
| It's like a burden has been lifted off your shoulders, and I love it. | ||
| What's interesting to me is that you're not just the average person walking away, but in many ways your job as an organizational therapist is sort of tied to why you're walking away. | ||
| Can you explain that a little bit? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So it was a little bit funny because after, of course, the Trump rally about a month later, the pandemic really hit. | ||
| And not too long after that, we had the George Floyd incident in Minneapolis. | ||
| And after that, critical race theory really started taking over my entire industry. | ||
| I had just been doing trainings with organizations about how to be better managers and how to communicate with each other and interpersonal communication and all that good stuff. | ||
| Well, critical race theory came in and took over absolutely Every single thing, and the results that I've seen have just really, they've emphasized why critical race theory is not a good direction to go in. | ||
| It's harming individuals, it's harming team cohesion, it's harming organizational productivity, and yet organizations all over the country are spending Thousands, tens of thousands, some of them millions of dollars on this training that has absolutely no foundational evidence to support its effectiveness. | ||
| And so that's really where I've been focusing on in the past couple months is fighting back against this monster that has taken over and really is doing a lot of harm to individuals and to organizations. | ||
| And you've done a really great job of sort of mapping how you can stand up to the mob and still survive because you talk about it, you've lost jobs. | ||
| because of this, but at the same time, you've got, I'm guessing, thousands of people reaching out to you, telling you, oh, this stuff, this critical race theory stuff, it's leaking into my organization, how do I fight it, and everything else. | ||
| Yeah, that's absolutely true. | ||
| I've definitely been cancelled by clients, but I've also gotten clients in return. | ||
| And, you know, really where I'm at right now is I just want to help people understand why this philosophy is so dangerous. | ||
| Because it's one of those things that, you know, one of the reasons it is so dangerous is because people don't understand it. | ||
| Organizations that are implementing it do not understand exactly what it means. | ||
| And so if we can help Debunk what's going on and really help people approach it in a more simple way where you can just get to the core issue of why this stuff is dangerous. | ||
| Then you can help them to understand and then fight back in their own lives. | ||
| Yeah, so you fighting back on this and, you know, having jobs canceled, and I know all too well the stories of what happens in a personal life, and just earlier today as we were tweeting like fools, the trolls were going after you and you said you were eating your sushi lunch and smiling, so I myself had a sushi lunch. | ||
| But that's sort of a good segue to why you're on Locals, because when we started Locals, my initial idea was, I want to find people who are doing good work, doing something valuable, but could still be crushed by big tech at any moment. | ||
| And the stuff that you're doing, which is true and decent and important, the big tech people ain't that thrilled with those ideas. | ||
| No, they're not. | ||
| It was funny because right after I was on your show the first time, I started a Facebook group basically trying to have civil discourse among people who disagreed with each other. | ||
| And that group is still around and it's still going. | ||
| But almost immediately upon starting that group, it became very clear that Facebook was going to censor it. | ||
| And they would just randomly delete things that, frankly, there was no problem with it. | ||
| If someone was just asking a question that Facebook deemed out of bounds, they would just delete it out of nowhere and then I'd get a notification. | ||
| And so I was really freaking out that one day I was just going to wake up And this group was going to be gone. | ||
| And so you kind of reached out to me and said, well, bring it on to Locals and you don't have to worry about that anymore. | ||
| And so that's exactly what I'm trying to do. | ||
| And congratulations. | ||
| It's your community. | ||
| You can regulate it or not regulate it. | ||
| It has nothing to do with me. | ||
| It actually doesn't really have anything to do with the Locals people. | ||
| We're just giving you the tools to do that. | ||
| So what are you doing on Locals that you can't do as easily when you're on Facebook or Twitter or elsewhere? | ||
| Well, you know, I mean, what's great about locals is it's like the adult community. | ||
| I mean, we were talking about how we were dealing with all these trolls on Twitter today. | ||
| Twitter is not the adult community. | ||
| You don't go on Twitter to have adult conversations. | ||
| Twitter is the mental institution. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And it can be fun and all that stuff. | ||
| But if you want to have adult conversations, you need an avenue to do that. | ||
| And even Facebook, it gets really hard to do it on there. | ||
| But what I love about locals is that people are self-selecting into this community. | ||
| There's that little barrier of having to pay like five bucks a month to join the platform so that you tend to get people that are much more interested in actually having those adult conversations. | ||
| And it's just so nice. | ||
| It's so calm. | ||
| And no one has to worry about being canceled. | ||
| You don't have to worry about being banned at a moment's notice because someone at Twitter or Facebook doesn't like what you're saying. | ||
| It's just, it's, it's a relief is the best way I can think to describe it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you had any crazy people in there? | ||
| I mean, has anyone decided I'm going to pay her money so that I can be mean? | ||
| Nobody does it, right? | ||
| Well, I'm sure you just gave them the idea to do that. | ||
| So thanks a lot for that. | ||
| I made you a couple bucks and then you have to decide if you want to keep them because it's up to you. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But to your point, no, that absolutely hasn't happened yet. | ||
| And, you know, in my locals community, we actually do weekly Zoom calls with all of my local supporters. | ||
| We actually get on just like this and we chat with each other. | ||
| And someone even said last week they were afraid. | ||
| They're like, I don't know if I'm going to vote for Trump and I'm afraid I'm going to get kicked out of the group. | ||
| It's like, no, you're not going to get kicked out of the group. | ||
| Just come in, be a reasonable human being. | ||
| That's really all we ask for. | ||
| It's interesting how just a couple bucks will kind of keep the riffraff out, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it just makes it nicer for everyone. | ||
| It's not only nicer for me as the person running the community, it's nicer for everyone else there. | ||
| And it allows people a way to develop those genuine human relationships. | ||
| And it's just been really, really fantastic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So when you're fighting the mob, I think I asked you a version of this question about a year ago when we first sat down, or maybe it wasn't even that long ago. | ||
| Time is very strange these days. | ||
| Since COVID, it's like, did that happen yesterday or four years ago? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| But what is it about you, do you think, that lets you be brave in these very strange times? | ||
| Because I think the reason you've made a mark suddenly is people are like, oh, that girl's saying what she thinks. | ||
| And so many people are afraid to do it. | ||
| Some guy wrote a book about that. | ||
| He did, he did. | ||
| And we're actually reading that book in my community right now. | ||
| Very nice, very nice. | ||
| But, you know, I think what for me is, I mean, frankly, what is lacking among so many of the people that we see out protesting that all want these safe spaces is I've had to overcome a lot of challenges in my life from my family to different, you know, bullies I've met in my life. | ||
| And I think that when you overcome challenges like that, it sets you up to take on things that are just simply You know, that are much more important. | ||
| So I think that I've developed the resiliency from having, you know, to overcome things throughout my life that I don't mind standing up on a stage and saying, you know, this is what I think. | ||
| This is why I walked away from the Democratic Party. | ||
| And some people are going to like it and some people are going to hate it. | ||
| And that's just the way it is. | ||
| But I also think that there's something to being in this every day, isn't there? | ||
| Is that when you have the hate come at you, it's a pattern. | ||
| And you can see that no matter what you say, no matter what you do, the hate comes in exactly the same way. | ||
| It's incredibly predictable. | ||
| And so after a while, you start to realize that it has nothing to do with you at all. | ||
| It has to do with them and where they're at and the goals that they have and trying to achieve those goals by any means necessary. | ||
| I can't take it personally. | ||
| It's not about me. | ||
| It's about them. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny. | ||
| I had a tweet that was catching fire today and I had a very, very minor typo in it. | ||
| And I had like hundreds of these trolls, you know, did you have a stroke? | ||
| Are you retarded? | ||
| Like stuff that's much worse than that. | ||
| And it's like, I don't really care about that. | ||
| But it's like, wait a minute. | ||
| I thought you guys were the tolerant, good people. | ||
| Maybe not as tolerant and good as you say you are, something like that? | ||
| Where do you sense your community going? | ||
| What's the goal? | ||
| And how do you stay out of the echo chamber? | ||
| I mean, one of the things that I'm trying to figure out with my own community is that, you know, people are paying a couple bucks to get in, so you're self-selecting a certain amount of people. | ||
| And I know for people like us, we don't want it to be just like-minded people. | ||
| And I love seeing people interact with each other and agree to disagree, but how do you guard against that? | ||
| You know, I really want to have more constructive discussion and constructive debate in my community. | ||
| One of the things that I found is that it is incredibly hard to get people who are not Trump supporters or people on the right to join the community. | ||
| We do have lefties in there and I'm grateful that they're in there and I'm grateful for their contribution, but I really want to see more of them. | ||
| So one of the things I want to do when I have a little downtime after the election is I want to start doing more constructive discussions. | ||
| I want to start a debate club. | ||
| I actually want to have a debate club where people get assigned their positions so they don't get to choose them. | ||
| So sometimes they might have to argue positions they don't agree with just to understand the other side. | ||
| And I think it's very important for people to demonstrate that they are capable of having adult conversations and walking away and being like, it's okay to disagree. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| We're all going to survive. | ||
| It's weird to be one of the adults in the room when there aren't many adults in the room, isn't it? | ||
| Well, I'll tell you, if you looked at my Twitter, you would not think I was one of the adults in the room, but I do really try to be in real life. | ||
| Well, I don't know what it says about the state of adulthood. | ||
| Like, I'm making as many Star Wars and G.I. | ||
| Joe references, and yet somehow I'm an adult in the room. | ||
| That's not because of me, that's mostly because of these people. | ||
| Well, I mean, that's a reflection of where the people we're fighting at are, aren't they? | ||
| Because if we're the adults in the room, I mean, they're the kindergartners in the room, aren't they? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All right, so one more question for you, and then I want you to pimp out your community as hardcore as you can. | ||
| What do you see as the path to getting out of the mess that we all feel like we're in, the political mess, the cultural mess, the societal mess? | ||
| Do you see a path out of it? | ||
| That really depends on us, doesn't it? | ||
| Because we all have to make the choice about how we show up every single day. | ||
| And if people don't want to show up in an adult way, then they're not going to. | ||
| If people don't want to have conversations with people they disagree with, they're not going to. | ||
| And I think my greatest fear in This whole thing is that it seems as though there are so many people that are just addicted to anger and outrage and fighting and that is a physical addiction that is an addiction just like cigarettes or drugs or alcohol and so in order to get past that addiction they have to want to overcome it and | ||
| I worry that there aren't enough people that want to overcome it. | ||
| But again, I'm on the ground every single week at walkaway rallies and I see that there are so many people that are being kind and like truly kind, not leftist kind of kind, but truly kind and empathetic and understanding to each other that it really does give me hope that it's possible. | ||
| But we're gonna have to see after the election. | ||
| I don't think we're gonna get there before November, but maybe afterwards. | ||
| Well, I'm with you, of course. | ||
| And you know, I guess I was sort of like the original why I left the left guy. | ||
| But then when I see people like you out there, I'm like, oh, it's just like, it's real. | ||
| Like it's real and it's happening with other people. | ||
| And it's great. | ||
| So Carlin, pimp it out. | ||
| Pimp out your locals. | ||
| Why should people join? | ||
| Yeah, they should join because it's just a group of regular people that we get together. | ||
| We chat about topics that are on our mind every single week. | ||
| We do it in the community. | ||
| We do it on Zoom. | ||
| We read books together. | ||
| It's super fun. | ||
| People can join at kb.locals.com. | ||
| That's kb.locals.com and I will see you out there in the field. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
Export Selection