Oct. 1, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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[Outro] | |
| Alright, we are live on the YouTube! | ||
| I'm still Dave Rubin and it's time for another Friday panel extravaganza. | ||
| I'm actually super excited for today's show. | ||
| We are doing an intellectual dark web, an IDW reunion, but is it a funeral or a comeback? | ||
| Joining me, our founder of Skeptic Magazine and author of Giving the Devil His Due, Michael Shermer, evolutionary behavioral scientist and author of The Parasitic Mind, Gad Saad. | ||
| and philosopher and author of How to Have Impossible Conversations, Peter Boghossian. | ||
| Fellas, you're all back on The Rubin Report. | ||
| How you doing? | ||
|
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Great. | |
| Never been better. | ||
| Well, why? | ||
| What have you heard? | ||
| Well, the world is falling apart. | ||
| That's why I wanted to talk to you all, guys. | ||
| Talk to you guys. | ||
| There is that. | ||
| But Pete, I'll start with you because you've never been better. | ||
| So before we get to anything else, you kind of broke some news over the last couple of weeks. | ||
| You left your job at Portland State. | ||
| You had been screaming for a couple of years about what was going on there and more broadly in the academic sphere. | ||
| And you just decided to move on. | ||
| You want to just count yourself? | ||
| I did. | ||
| I had enough. | ||
| I couldn't take it anymore. | ||
| It was an ideology mill. | ||
| And I actually want to take this opportunity to thank... I feel like I'm... I don't know. | ||
| Gad's a very good friend of mine. | ||
| Michael's a very close friend of mine. | ||
| Dave, you were a very close friend of mine. | ||
| And you were all so supportive of me in that time. | ||
| And so I'm really appreciative. | ||
| But I just couldn't take it anymore. | ||
| It was just so... | ||
| It really, truly was an indoctrination mill. | ||
| And I left with my integrity intact. | ||
| I fought as hard as I could. | ||
| I did everything I could. | ||
| But in the end, it was just better for me to leave. | ||
| All right, so you know what? | ||
| Before we get to the IDW stuff, since all three of you have worked and do work at different times on college campuses, Gad, you're up in Canada, which has its own set of problems. | ||
| What's going on at the university level there? | ||
| Is it still in the same sort of meltdown feeling that we have here? | ||
| I mean, it is in that I was just complaining, I was lamenting to my wife that whenever I look at the emails that I receive that are university related, I'm not joking if I told you that probably 20, 30% are going to be related to woke related issues. | ||
| And so it's, you almost feel like you're in a bizarro world where all you talk about is, you know, indigenous this, BIPOC that, for those of you who don't know the BIPOC acronym, Black Indigenous People of Color. | ||
| So it's just grievance, grievance, grievance, self-flagellation. | ||
| I long for the day where I receive an email that's talking about some wonderful intellectual pursuit that the university is engaging in. | ||
| Regrettably, these are not coming very often. | ||
| Michael, you're over at Chapman, which is here in crazy California, but I think it's been a little bit better over there on the free speech side of things. | ||
| Is that fair to say? | ||
| Yeah, no, our president, Daniele Strupp, is pretty friendly to the kinds of ideas we talk about in the IDW and in our shows and so forth. | ||
| Very pro-free speech. | ||
| But of course, he only has so much control. | ||
| He has a board and, you know, we just hired a dean of diversity, equity and inclusion. | ||
| And for the life of me, I can't figure out what he's going to do because Chapman is one of the most students, you know, just incredibly liberal. | ||
| tolerant, open to diversity, equity and inclusion. | ||
| They are super inclusive. | ||
| So I'm not sure what the problem to be solved there is. | ||
| But he's just following along with what everybody else in the country is doing, not just in academia, but in corporate America of hiring people to ferret out every last fraction, minute, tiny little bit of bigotry, racism, misogyny, etc. | ||
| Even if maybe it doesn't even exist, just something that's adjacent to bigotry, racism and misogyny. | ||
| And, and that, you know, that's kind of a common trend. | ||
| If you walk around college campuses, you don't see, you know, just kind of a nonstop protests and the breaking of Starbucks windows and things like that. | ||
| You know, there's a certain amount of the availability heuristic at work when, you know, if you just watch Tucker Carlson and his, you know, great campus craziness weekly segments, it looks like You know, the colleges have completely melted down. | ||
| And if you go to campuses, you just don't see this. | ||
| Most students would just hold up in their dorms if they're hanging out at the at the Starbucks or whatever. | ||
| And there's not much happening at all. | ||
| But nevertheless, the you know, a small percentage of activists stoking emotions can seemingly take over the you know, the conversation that way. | ||
| And so that's You know, that's still a problem. | ||
| We have to, you know, we have to still stay on top of it. | ||
| And I keep thinking the pendulum is going to swing the other way. | ||
| My wife and I have had these conversations. | ||
| We have a five year old and he just started kindergarten. | ||
| And we are worried about critical race theory and wokeism and all the gender stuff infiltrating his schools. | ||
| And my wife's from Germany, six, seven years here now, and she's been very worried about this. | ||
| And I keep telling her every few months, this is going to swing around the other way. | ||
| I remember seeing these things go on for decades and it goes back and forth. | ||
| It's going to be fine. | ||
| And she keeps asking me, when's that pendulum going to start swinging the other way? | ||
| Cause it looks like it's going. | ||
| The wrong direction. | ||
| Yeah, well, speaking of the pendulum, I mean, that's sort of what put us all on the map | ||
| in a bigger way about four or five years ago when the intellectual dark web thing kind of came together. | ||
| And it was sort of an accident. | ||
| And the name IDW, which came from Eric Weinstein, was kind of a joke. | ||
| It was sort of, you know, kind of tongue in cheek. | ||
| But it was basically all four of us were part of this group of people who were on podcasts | ||
| and YouTube shows and Joe Rogan, obviously in my garage is kind of where it started, | ||
| where we were just talking about stuff. | ||
| And we were talking about existential stuff. | ||
| And we were talking about political stuff and philosophical stuff and religious stuff | ||
| and all of this without hating each other. | ||
| Um... | ||
| Flash forward to 2021, it seems like all of the things that we were warning about have gotten significantly worse. | ||
| Did we kind of fail in a way? | ||
| I mean, I hate to say it, but in some respect, did we? | ||
| Was there any chance we could have stopped any of this, Gad? | ||
| I don't think we failed. | ||
| I mean, you could only deliver the message. | ||
| And if people decide to not heed your warning, it's kind of like saying, if I'm a physician and I keep warning people that you should not live a sedentary life and you should exercise and you should not eat French fries three times a day, And they still do it. | ||
| Well, then, you know, is it on me that they developed heart disease and diabetes? | ||
| So I think we've done our part. | ||
| I sleep well at night knowing that whenever I have the opportunity to contribute to the battle of ideas, I'm certainly doing my part. | ||
| Each of us here is doing their part. | ||
| I do think, though, like what Michael was saying earlier about the pendulum swinging, I do think that at some point it will start to swing. | ||
| And I don't think it will take as long as people might think for things to autocorrect. | ||
| I think the problem remains that the silent majority, and I'm sure you all receive thousands of emails, is completely on board with our ideas. | ||
| The problem is to get them to activate their intestinal fortitude, if not testicular fortitude, to speak out. | ||
| Once that happens, I think the whole ship can be redressed very quickly. | ||
| So I remain very optimistic. | ||
| Pete, I mean, you left your job, so it's not like you didn't put your career on the line because of all of this. | ||
| Are you as hopeful on the pendulum thing? | ||
| I'm still not sure. | ||
| I mean, we've all been saying, oh, it'll correct at some point. | ||
| You know, they'll come to the real world, these kids, and the real world will show them what's what. | ||
| But that pendulum seems like it's breaking off one end and just going. | ||
| But I mean, I guess it could come around in that case. | ||
| But, you know, you put your butt on the line for all this. | ||
| There's no question that it's gotten significantly worse. | ||
| It gets worse month by month. | ||
| And I'm like Michael, I keep expecting some kind of a correction and then more instances of craziness come out and more crisis of confidence in the system. | ||
| You know, Michael mentioned the diversity officer. | ||
| I think the key thing to know is that those are offices in search of tasks. | ||
| And it's not whether or not racism occurred. | ||
| It's how racism occurred. | ||
| So you have institutionalized nested within these academic bodies and institutions The constant perennial search for any kind of racism, even if it doesn't exist. | ||
| I don't, here's what I know. | ||
| I'm very confident that this ideology is not sustainable. | ||
| I'm extremely confident about that. | ||
| What I don't know is when the expiration date is and what damage it will do to our institutions along the way, because it is taking a considerable toll. | ||
| I don't, I don't know. | ||
| But I will admit fully that even I am surprised that it keeps getting worse and worse and worse. | ||
| Michael, you mentioned... Gad, go ahead, then I'll throw it to Michael. | ||
| I was just going to say, I mean, there are real consequences beyond sort of the typical stuff that we talk about, about this, you know, all of these parasitic ideas infiltrating the university. | ||
| So I'll give you a concrete example from my personal life. | ||
| It is now impossible for you to apply for a scientific grant If you don't have a die statement, a diversity equity statement. | ||
| And I know many people, some who are very principled people who said that I am going to refrain from applying for a grant because I am so vehemently against participating in this, you know, die statement BS, right? | ||
| Well, those are real consequences, right? | ||
| I'm not saying that every single research program is a cure for cancer. | ||
| but someone is deciding that after all of the training in their life they'd rather not participate | ||
| in the research endeavor if it implies that they have to be complicit in playing these | ||
| woke games and so these are real serious problems and we really truly have to resolve them as soon | ||
| Yeah, and of course, Gad, in that regard, I mean, your history of growing up in Lebanon during the war and being a refugee that eventually made it to Canada, you don't count in any of that diversity stuff. | ||
| That's probably because you're up in Canada right now, your tan is real low. | ||
| If you were in SoCal, you were a little darker. | ||
| Maybe you get some credit, but Michael, you mentioned you have a five-year-old, and just before we started this, here in California, you're in California as well, they are now announcing, Newsom has just announced vaccine mandates for all kids at school from grades seven to 12, and they're recommending it for five-year-olds to, I think, what was it? | ||
| Five and up. | ||
| How do you feel about that sort of specifically for your child, but also more broadly that the government is just saying who has to be injected with what, when, while it seems at least to me, pretty unclear whether any of this stuff is working as promised. | ||
| Yeah, I would, I'm not going to get my five-year-old vaccinated at this point. | ||
| You know, there, as far as I know from the science, you know, he's in the lowest risk cohort there is. | ||
| Well, we found a, essentially a homeschool Montessori school in Santa Barbara here that's independent and they, there's no masks and, you know, they're not socially distanced. | ||
| It's, it's a small school, but, so, you know, it's one thing to recommend. | ||
| It's another thing to mandate. | ||
| I certainly would be against the latter, particularly in, in cohorts like this, where it's not well known what the effects might be on a five-year-old, seven-year-old, whatever. | ||
| Certainly older adults and, you know, my wife and I are both vaccinated, double vaxxed, and, you know, we wear our masks where we have to here in Santa Barbara where it's required. | ||
| You know, I don't want to be that guy that draws the line in the sand like that guy last weekend. | ||
| I think it was an American Airlines flight. | ||
| He decided he had had enough with masks at 35,000 feet up and stood up in the middle of the island, confronted the flight attendant like this is his moment. | ||
| Well, you know, he's in jail now. | ||
| So I don't want to be that guy. | ||
| You know, I do think there's, you know, there's value to the vaccines, certainly. | ||
| It doesn't look like the masks, at least the flimsy little cloth masks that most of us wear. | ||
| You know, the M95 masks, is that right? | ||
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M95? | |
| Anyway, the 95 masks, they seem to work much better. | ||
| That's a little stronger than the flimsy one, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| They seem to make a difference. | ||
| But for, you know, just in terms of who's most at risk, you know, children are the least at risk for both getting the COVID and the effects of it. | ||
| on their body. | ||
| So, it seems weird that that has become the emphasis now. | ||
| There was a meme going around the other day of showing, you know, three panels. | ||
| The top panel was the U.S. | ||
| Open audience, you know, 15,000 people packed in there, no masks. | ||
| And then an NFL game, you know, 50,000 people packed in, no masks. | ||
| And then school children, here they are, socially distanced, desks are six feet apart, and they're all masked up. | ||
| you know, the least risk, you know, cohort versus the higher at risk. It's the, I think it's the | ||
| inconsistency, the hypocrisy of government officials and mandates and recommendations | ||
| that bothers people the most. | ||
| You know, there's multiple reasons for vaccine hesitancy, but that's one of them. | ||
| And particularly here in California, you know, as you know, Newsom hasn't been very consistent to say the least. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Pete, what do we do with that then? | ||
| Because that's what I'm struggling with more than anything else. | ||
| I would like to trust the experts. | ||
| I really would. | ||
| I would like to trust the scientists. | ||
| And at some level, I'd like to trust the government people. | ||
| I really would. | ||
| But to me, they have failed at virtually every level, period. | ||
| The Fauci emails where he's telling his friends don't wear masks when they're on vacation | ||
| while he's telling everyone else to wear masks. | ||
| Then he's telling people, oh no, don't wear masks 'cause you touch your face more. | ||
| Then he's telling people to double mask. | ||
| You know, Newsom, of course, going to French Laundry with lobbyists while he's locking the rest of us down. | ||
| That the trusted class, the trusted class has basically been obliterated. | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| Yeah, that's the problem. | ||
| It's also the perception of hypocrisy. | ||
| I just want to go back to something Michael said. | ||
| I'm very surprised to hear that you did not vaccinate your five-year-old. | ||
| So what's the reason for that? | ||
| Is it lack of insufficient longitudinal studies or what? | ||
| Well, yeah, exactly. | ||
| I mean, the recommendations that Dave was talking about, they just came down. | ||
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What? | |
| Yesterday? | ||
| Here we are, October 1st. | ||
| I think it was September. | ||
|
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Today? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I'm going to definitely wait and see. | ||
| I mean, we are very isolated here where we live. | ||
| The school is small. | ||
| You know, the chances of him being exposed at all are very slim. | ||
| And I just want to see what the risks are of the vaccine itself on children. | ||
| We just don't know. | ||
| I mean, it's too preliminary. | ||
| But not only is it preliminary, there's just no evidence that five-year-olds are getting COVID all over the place and spreading it to each other and spreading it to their parents and the teachers we know are vaccinated, and in most cases, the parents are. | ||
| That's what I'm concerned about, that nothing is making sense anymore. | ||
| Can I, I can maybe jump in? | ||
| You know, one of the areas that I study in my scientific work is psychology of decision-making, right? | ||
| And if you want to talk about someone is rational or irrational, there are certain axioms that you look for. So for example, if I prefer car A to car | ||
| B and I prefer car B to car C, I must prefer car A to car C. If I don't do that, I'm being | ||
| intransitive. I'm being irrational. | ||
| Well, when I see, so to build on what Michael was saying, when I see the haphazard nature of how | ||
| these edicts come down from above, when I see the inconsistencies, when I see, as several people | ||
| have mentioned, the hypocrisy, it's not, you don't have to be an anti-vaxxer, you don't have to be an | ||
| anti-science person to then build hesitancy towards the vaccine, if only because it all | ||
| seems so irrational, so hypocritical, so seat of your pants type of policymaking. | ||
| So I think if we were able to do a better job at truly having a dialogue about these issues, which of course we can't because then we'll be censored, and so it becomes a catch-22 situation. | ||
| So people are walking around with a great sense of frustration because they truly feel that they are living in a authoritarian period, and that's not good for anyone. | ||
| So Michael, as a guy that's made a living being a skeptic, I mean, are you sort of concerned | ||
| that the idea of skepticism is just disappearing? | ||
| Either people are just checking out, they're like, oh, I don't believe any of this, | ||
| and then going down whatever rabbit hole they wanna go down, or they've just decided | ||
| they're not gonna pay attention to anything, or they're just gonna make whatever decision | ||
| is based on their whim because you feel like you're gonna get banned if you don't go along | ||
| with the party line. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| We just did an issue of Skeptic on this very topic with Steve Pinker on our cover. | ||
| Are we living in a post-truth era? | ||
| Well, for starters, just asking the question means we're not, because the people that argue we're living in a post-truth era are making an argument, which means they're not living in a post-truth era. | ||
| They still think reason and arguments matter. | ||
| That said, I think part of the problem is, in addition to the normal cognitive biases that we're familiar with, the confirmation bias and the hindsight bias and availability heuristic and the anchoring effect and things like that, the my side bias, I think, has gotten much worse in the last, well, since the 2016 election. | ||
| Things have become so much more polarized that people evaluate evidence based on whether it supports their side or not, usually politically. | ||
| This used to be more prominent in religion, whether it supports your religious beliefs or not. | ||
| Now it's more politics, and worse, not just on the right, of course, the Trump effect, but also on the left. | ||
| I mean, wokeism and progressivism and anti-racism, these are all faux religions, as John McWhorter and Pete, I think you were even ahead of John in making that analogy, that it's like a religion. | ||
| You know, we're all born in original sin. | ||
| of being subconsciously racist and bigoted and misogynist and so on. | ||
| And, and the only way to atone for it is, you know, is to basically castrate yourself. | ||
| You talk about this, I get in your book, you had that, that word that castrato, I think, people, anyway, you know, I think that my side bias is so strong now that it taints all evaluations of evidence claims. | ||
| In the media. | ||
| So we don't really trust the media. | ||
| And back to the IDW, one of the reasons for that, I think, movement start in any way was just pushing back against mainstream media or a legacy media. | ||
| You know, if we can't trust them, who can we trust? | ||
| Well, we just have to start our own systems. | ||
| And of course, that has its own fraughtness because there's, you know, a lot of most podcasters and bloggers don't have fact checkers and editors. | ||
| And, you know, so that's problematic also. | ||
| But nevertheless, it's a trust issue. | ||
| It's a my side bias. | ||
| I think that's affecting most of our thinking on this. | ||
| So, Pete, with that in mind, since you wrote a book about having impossible conversations, I think I've discussed this all with you all separately. | ||
| But my thinking at this point is that at the end of a purely secular society that only is based on enlightenment values and sort of the Pinker ideology, That you are going to get this crazy, sort of nothing is true, men or women, 3.5 trillion equals zero, that if it's just only based on logic and reason, you ironically get the most illogical and irrational world, which sort of seems what we're entering in. | ||
| I know I'm speaking to three atheists. | ||
| I think, Ed, you're still considered an atheist, but we'll get to that in a sec. | ||
| But Pete, what do you think about that basic premise there? | ||
| Yeah, I think it's false, and I'll tell you why. | ||
| The societies that don't do well, they don't, as Michael's book, bend the moral arc towards justice from Martin Luther King, societies that don't do those tend to be more religious. | ||
| And Michael is correct about the parallels between wokeism and traditional religion and the structures that they use, like blasphemy laws and political correctness to keep beliefs in place. | ||
| So the societies, when they become, and I'm thinking of, you know, the Civil Rights Act, or I'm thinking of even birth control for women, Americans with Disabilities Act. | ||
| Those have come about precisely because we've become more rational and more evidence-based. | ||
| And so I believe, and my guess is that Gadd and Michael do as well, that you can rationally drive. | ||
| You can basically sit down and think about what kind of life you ought to lead and what's the best type of life and that there are correct answers to that question. | ||
| That gets back to Socrates and the Republic. | ||
| He talks about that quite a bit. | ||
| And so the question is, how do we come together to make those lives where we can all flourish. | ||
| The problem in which we have now, and then I'll relate it to the IDW in a moment, is that we are unwilling or unable to have conversations with people because everyone is looking at different tribes as an existential threat. | ||
| So how do we, how do we do that? | ||
| Especially when our university system writ large really doesn't encourage those kinds of conversations. | ||
| For example, why isn't there a conversation between Leaders in the BLM movement and police tactics, people who actually teach police tactics. | ||
| I recommended that to someone and they said, what are you effing crazy? | ||
| We could never do that. | ||
| So we're not seeing that behavior model for them. | ||
| And I think one of the original, the freshness of the IDW was that people really were having those conversations. | ||
| There were no speech restrictions on those. | ||
| People were engaging each other. | ||
| And I also think that's one of the reasons why your podcast is so successful and Rogan's. | ||
| Is it because people are hungry? | ||
| Aristotle writes about that, that people want to know. | ||
| All people want to know. | ||
| I think it's the first line of the ethics. | ||
| And so what do they do? | ||
| Well, one of the ways they get to know is they want to talk to people who have different ideas. | ||
| They want to challenge themselves. | ||
| They want to be challenged and challenge others. | ||
| And if you take that mechanism away, what happens? | ||
| Well, nothing good happens. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And by the way, Pete, I actually agree with your premise there, except that here we are in this place right now. | ||
| So I agree that I would prefer that a society do it. | ||
| And I think when times are good, America had 200 years of furthering, of liberalizing in the true sense to get to equality. | ||
| But now it seems that the hyper secularization or something has jumped the gun on that. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| And then I'll throw it to Gad. | ||
| Real quick, so here we are, the reason we're here is not because we've eschewed religion. | ||
| It's because we've adopted, we've become religious. | ||
| We've become religious in a new religion, in wokeism, and we've adopted a similar architecture and similar structures to traditional religions. | ||
| That's why we're here, is that we've abnegated basic principles of reason, dialectic, discourse, conversation, counterexamples, belief revision, All of the necessary constituents of rationality, even the attitude. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Gad, is that sort of proof of what your last book was about, The Parasitic Mind, that the parasite got in? | ||
| And my argument is that the rationalization world, the rational world just wasn't strong enough. | ||
| So here we are. | ||
| But the parasite got in one way or another. | ||
| And so I'll link your question to what you were mentioning earlier about the IDW. | ||
| I think what my book shows is not only that The idea pathogens that I, you know, enumerate in my book all stem from professors. | ||
| But the members of the IDW, without mentioning any, that you would think are all committed to truth, to the, you know, intellectual diversity, to the scientific method, they too can be parasitized by various idea pathogens. | ||
| And that's been my biggest disappointment. | ||
| And that's why I wanted to frankly disassociate from some of the folks. | ||
| Because if you are a true intellectual, There has to be a bend towards deontological ethics, right? | ||
| There are certain things that are absolutely incontestable that you're never going to yield on. | ||
| So for example, if you truly believe in freedom of speech, you can't be a consequentialist and say, well, I, of course I'm a strong believer in freedom of speech, but not when it comes from that, for that ogre Trump. | ||
| If you are a true person who believes in presumption of innocence, then that has to be a deontological position. | ||
| It's not, I believe in, in, presumption of innocence, but not when it comes to the gang | ||
| rapist, Brett Kavanaugh. | ||
| And so seeing these types of violation of deontological first principles, | ||
| and people turn into grotesque consequentialists on such important issues, | ||
| that has been a big disappointment when it comes to certain members of the IDW. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, Gad, you know, I'm with you on that. | ||
| If we're going to be quiet when, you know, regardless of what we think about Alex Jones's opinions, if we're all going to be quiet when he's silenced, well, of course, it wasn't going to stop with him. | ||
| And then if we're going to, say, thank Jack when Donald Trump is banned, we're sort of being inconsistent. | ||
| Michael, should we have all done a better job on that, at least, defending some of the people that maybe we didn't like? | ||
| Hmm, I don't know. | ||
| I think most of us spoke out. | ||
| I was not in favor of banning either Alex Jones or Donald Trump, even though personally, I was kind of glad to see Alex Jones go because, you know, so so much of his stuff was harmful. | ||
| But see that there at some point when it becomes a crime, when he his actions lead his followers to go to the homes of the parents of the Sandy Hook massacre, children, families and and harass them Well, that's not a free that's no longer a free speech issue. | ||
| Now you have, you know, actually laws being violated there. | ||
| So you could defend Alex Jones's freedom to have his own platform and and say what he wants. | ||
| But, you know, there are restrictions to free speech that are already built into the laws that we're pretty familiar with libel and slander. | ||
| And and, you know, you can't you can't just give the nuclear codes to the North Koreans of our nuclear weapons. | ||
| That's not free speech. | ||
| That's treason. | ||
| You know, so there are a number of built-in legal already restrictions that have been played out in the Supreme Court over the last century. | ||
| I want to just add here, I think, you know, how bad things are. | ||
| Well, again, to this my side bias, and there's also a selection bias of what things, what items people want to be skeptical of. | ||
| And so I think of different kinds of truths, like empirical truths, things that we can actually test and know. | ||
| But then there's political and religious truths, things that are not really knowable in some empirical sense, but people believe them anyway. | ||
| And I think a lot of political and religious beliefs are safely parked away from empirical truths. | ||
| So when people say they believe them, they don't mean believe in the empirical sense. | ||
| I was writing about this in my next big book on conspiracies, QAnon. | ||
| You know, the idea that there's a secret satanic cult of pedophiles being run by Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks out of a pizzeria Washington, D.C. | ||
| No one can possibly believe that. | ||
| I mean, one guy did. | ||
| Edgar Welch. | ||
| He went there with a gun because that's what you would do. | ||
| Most people left, you know, like a one star on Yelp for that pizza place. | ||
| You know, and one guy wrote that the pizza was too doughy and it was undercooked. | ||
| You know, that's not what you do if you think there's an actual pedophile ring going on. | ||
| You call the police. | ||
| You go there yourself. | ||
| And so I think most people don't actually believe that. | ||
| It's a proxy truth for something else. | ||
| I don't trust Democrats. | ||
| I hate that Hillary Clinton. | ||
| So such that, for example, if I point out there's no basement at the pizzeria, at Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria, there's no pedophile ring there, and you and I go there, you're not going to go, oh, in that case, I guess I'll vote for Hillary. | ||
| You were never going to vote for Hillary. | ||
| So the conspiracy theory is just, it's a stand in for something else. | ||
| And I think a lot of conspiracy theories are like that. | ||
| They're proxies for something else, such that when someone like me comes along to debunk the JFK conspiracy or the 9/11 truth conspiracy. | ||
| It isn't the debunking that matters. | ||
| The facts are not relevant. | ||
| It's standing for something else. | ||
| Michael, I'm reminded of when we spoke, I think it was at University of Arizona, | ||
| and I asked if there were any Nazis in the crowd, and a woman in the back raised her hand, | ||
| and it turned out that she was a trans Nazi. | ||
| And she asked you about how at, I think she was talking about Auschwitz or one of the concentration camps, they didn't have doors. | ||
| And that proves that the Holocaust was a hoax. | ||
| You calmly explained to her why they had moved things for different reasons. | ||
| And I'm pretty sure she didn't, you know, turn in her Nazi card after. | ||
| So I think that proves your point. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| So, you know, Holocaust denial, it's not about the facts, you know, that, you know, how many Jews were killed and how do we know? | ||
| And this, you know, the gas staining on the gas chamber at Majdanek, the blue staining from the Zyklon B. It's still there. | ||
| You can go there and see it. | ||
| And on and on. | ||
| It's not about that. | ||
| It's anti-Semitism. | ||
| It's about concerns of American support of Israel. | ||
| That's really what it's about. | ||
| And they want to Kind of kick under the foundation of what they think is the foundation of American support for Israel and Jews is this Holocaust thing. | ||
| They're mistaken about that, but that's the thought. | ||
| Such that if I point out that, in fact, the reason there's no holes on the ceiling at gas chambers two and three at Auschwitz-Birkenau, this is the thing that David Ervin used to talk about. | ||
| No holes, no Holocaust. | ||
| And you go there and you see, well, Nazi dynamited the gas chambers. | ||
| There's no ceiling at all, much less holes. | ||
| It's just rubble. | ||
| You know, Irving didn't go, Oh, I see. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| In that case, there was a Holocaust. | ||
| Therefore, maybe, you know, the Jews are not that bad or whatever. | ||
| Maybe they didn't lie about this. | ||
| No, no, because it was never about that. | ||
| That's an excuse to, you know, buttress a belief that you hold for other reasons. | ||
| Are you guys sympathetic to the people that get hit with the parasitic ideas or go down the rabbit holes and all of that? | ||
| Because I actually am quite sympathetic to them. | ||
| When we see a mainstream media that lies about everything, the Covington kids are racist, Brett Kavanaugh is a serial rapist, Jesse Smollett was lynched, etc. | ||
| You know, the Russia hoax, everything. | ||
| I'm very sympathetic. | ||
| Well, I guess I would draw the distinction. | ||
| down these pathways or hit with bad ideas. | ||
| And I wanna help them as much as I can. | ||
| It's why I do my show the way I do it. | ||
| But I don't blame them in some ways, Gad. | ||
| Well, I guess I would draw the distinction. | ||
| When you talk about narcissism, you could talk about benign narcissism | ||
| or you could talk about malignant narcissism, right? | ||
| So when it comes to people who are parasitized by these bad ideas, I guess it depends | ||
| on whether they're just hapless victims of these ideas that take a hold of them | ||
| or whether they become malignant in how they react to being infested | ||
| So when you have someone who is trying to consistently tag your university because you dared criticize Serena Williams, because therefore that means you're a racist, then I don't have any sympathy for them. | ||
| I think they are a cretinous fool, And I want to go after them. | ||
| But you're right that in some cases, you know, if you have a poor student who is simply being parasitized by a professor because you think that your professor is the purveyor of truth, then I'm a bit more sympathetic towards them and I try to reach out to these people. | ||
| That's why I also do what I do. | ||
| So there is a mix of parasitized people. | ||
| Some are malignant, some are benign. | ||
| Peter, are we making some headway with these people? | ||
| In one sense, they're epistemic victims, but in another sense, I really pity them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, how horrible to live your life like that? | |
| How horrible to base your relationships and your friendships like that? | ||
| And what's interesting to me, Johnny Depp just came out against cancel culture because he himself, evidently there were attempts to cancel him. | ||
| And so many people, friends of mine have come out recently against cancel culture and such. | ||
| But it's never that people, or very rarely is it that people come out against an injustice. | ||
| Plato talks about that. | ||
| It's not the fear of doing, but of suffering a wrong that calls forth the reproaches of those who revile injustice. | ||
| In other words, it's always when these things happen to you that you then speak out against them, but you don't speak out against them before they happen. | ||
| That's incredibly frustrating when people see that, but they really are epistemic victims. | ||
| You know, their moral mind has been overridden by the rational mind. | ||
| And Gad is absolutely correct. | ||
| Those are parasitic values. | ||
| I want to throw something in. | ||
| It's not come up in the conversation, but it really irks and annoys me. | ||
| People constantly just listening to a podcast today about the universities have become liberal and liberal and they're making them. | ||
| No, it's exactly the opposite. | ||
| The universities become illiberal. | ||
| Illiberal, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and people are throwing around, so this is not a right-left issue, right? | ||
| This is, we're teaching people very dangerous ideas, and we're not teaching them, and we're not even modeling for them basic values. | ||
| You know, like Michael has written about before, when someone asks you a question and you don't know, you just say, I don't know. | ||
| And we've really created these cultures of pretending. | ||
| So no, I actually am, I don't harbor any animus to these folks. | ||
| I really feel bad for them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alright, I got one more for you guys, and I just want to say before I get to it that it's been a pleasure talking to you guys again, and we really haven't done much on the political front, really. | ||
| This was what the point of the whole thing was. | ||
| My last question, Michael, you're in Cali. | ||
| Gad, you're in Canada. | ||
| Pete, you're in Portland. | ||
| I'm in Cali. | ||
| These are all places that are hurting right now. | ||
| Or either the state or the country, the city, whatever it is. | ||
| Are you hopeful about the place that you live and then just more broadly about the West to survive this thing? | ||
| Michael, I'll start with you. | ||
| Oh, I am. | ||
| I am hopeful. | ||
| I'm optimistic. | ||
| I do think the surveys generally show that most people, citizens, for example, are against critical race theory being taught in schools. | ||
| Yesterday, I had Jason Riley from the Wall Street Journal on my podcast, and he was citing studies showing that most blacks do not support critical race theory. | ||
| They don't think the police are out to kill them. | ||
| They don't want to defund the police. | ||
| It's black elites and then white intellectuals in general in academia who say these things. | ||
| And so I think if enough of us keep speaking out, you know, in kind of the intellectual realm, In the academic realm against this, it'll make it that will turn the tide of that small elite that are that are pushing these ideas. | ||
| And that will maybe, I think, embolden the average person to speak up, you know, stand up and say, no, we've had enough of this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so there I'm optimistic. | |
| Well, crazy Cali. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you know, Democrats outvote Republicans two to one here. | ||
| So it's hard to see how that's going to turn around anytime soon. | ||
| We do have another election for governor in a year and a half, I guess, something like that. | ||
| It's unlikely a Republican would come to power, but you never know. | ||
| I mean, things have changed in Texas over the decades and other states as well. | ||
| So it could happen. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| You know, it's not a bad place to live in terms of the, at least the weather. | ||
| I'm not crazy about the taxes and the other restrictions. | ||
| Yeah, the weather is better than the taxes. | ||
| Gad, you're in Canada, which has still some like strange lockdown stuff. | ||
| It's hard to get out. | ||
| It's hard to get in. | ||
| On top of the fact that they're, you know, we're seeing videos, they're arresting people for protesting COVID mandates, all sorts of stuff. | ||
| How hopeful are you? | ||
| Look, I am hopeful again because I think that you just need to light the match so that people find their courage. | ||
| I speak to innumerable people, all of whom are very frustrated, but yet they always have an excuse as to why they shouldn't contribute, why they shouldn't throw their hat into the ring, why it's too dangerous for them, they might lose their job. | ||
| I think that once people in unison or semi-unison Start finding their courage. | ||
| I truly think many of these problems will go away. | ||
| But until we do, I mean, it's a classic, what's called an economics tragedy in the commons, right? | ||
| Once we resolve that problem, I'm very, very hopeful that the ship will be redressed. | ||
| So be hopeful, be optimistic. | ||
| There are better days ahead. | ||
| I probably should have ended it with Gad right there. | ||
| Pete, you're in Portland. | ||
| I have a feeling it's going to be a little tough to be so rosy in the City of Roses. | ||
| Yeah, no, I was actually saying this to you before we went on. | ||
| Every day, I mean literally every day, you can see it. | ||
| Just two or three, the deterioration, two or three blocks from my house, there are maybe 300 homeless people who have erected tents. | ||
| The mayor of Portland, Is a public disgrace, his grotesque competence in a way that he's mismanaged the city and the murder rate going up 2000% and his attempting to or his disbanding the gun reduction task force because they said it was racist and pulled over more African Americans. | ||
| The consequence of that is that we had more dead African Americans. | ||
| So as long as our current mayor is in office, I see no hope whatsoever for Portland. | ||
| I see only continued deterioration. | ||
| And crime, it's really a cesspool of crime and needles and trash and filth. | ||
| However, I'm incredibly optimistic about Western civilization. | ||
| We have, there are values that we have in this country that are worth fighting for. | ||
| Reason is worth fighting for. | ||
| Due process is worth fighting for. | ||
| Cognitive liberty is worth fighting for. | ||
| Freedom of speech, freedom of the press. | ||
| And they don't evaporate the moment you get slugged. | ||
| And you will get slugged. | ||
| And we are getting slugged. | ||
| And what we need to do now is we need to punch back and we need to stand up and we need to teach a generation of people why they should stand for the flag. | ||
| Not just that they should stand for the flag, but what that means. | ||
| But in the same breath, we also have to teach that there's a kind of liberty that's unique to this country. | ||
| This country really is a shining city on the hill. | ||
| And we've lost that and we've forgotten that. | ||
| And we need to re-remember why the values that we've created that people have died for in the freest, most open, less racist country in the world, those values have sustainability. | ||
| They will last. | ||
| Western civilization will last. | ||
| That's right-wing maniac Pete Boghossian, everybody. | ||
| Pete, you finished this on a good note. | ||
| This thing could have went off the rails, but you took us home. | ||
| Guys, it was really great seeing the three of you again, and I hope we can do this in person over drinks and steaks sometime soon. | ||
| I'm gonna finish up without you, but have a good weekend, guys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| That was sort of why I started this show in the first place. | ||
| It was a long time since we've done one of those and you know I know we could do probably a much deeper autopsy on what happened to the IDW and you know sort of those the magic years of 2017 to 19 or so that you know I was on tour for a good portion at least a year and a half of that with Jordan Peterson and literally got to go to You know, something like 20 countries and thousands, saw thousands and thousands of real people who were turning their lives around because of sort of some of the ideas that we talked about here. | ||
| But in the case of being on tour with Jordan, it was about fixing your life first before you fix society, which then you can get to some of the stuff we just talked about there. | ||
| But I will just add one thing, which is that Pete's ending there is right. | ||
| There is something worth fighting for here. | ||
| And it feels like it is under assault. | ||
| A minute before we started this show, I got the news about vaccine mandates for California students. | ||
| And it's like the ever encroaching hysterical authoritarian ideology. | ||
| It is here. | ||
| We cannot pretend it's not here, right? | ||
| As Gad would say, we can't be the ostrich with our head in the ground just pretending it's not here, because then you just end up as a beheaded ostrich. | ||
| So we have to confront it. | ||
| We have to say, we're here, we're going to fight. | ||
| the more parents that stand up at school board meetings, the more of you that will, whatever the fight is, | ||
| I don't even mean to make this just about vaccine mandates or anything, | ||
| whatever the fight is, whatever they're encroaching on in your life that you have to fight for, | ||
| nobody is coming to save you but you. | ||
| Yeah, there's some people that can talk about this stuff online, but like, that's it. | ||
| And don't think the government is coming to save you. | ||
| And just in the last, you know, two weeks or so here in California, and I get it, | ||
| you know, I talk about California because I live here at least for now. | ||
| It's like, I get that it's screwy, but in the two weeks since the recall ended, | ||
| the first thing they did was add more mandates related to restaurants here in SoCal. | ||
| That was one thing. | ||
| Then Gavin Newsom signed an order that all of our elections will be through the mail. | ||
| You think that might have something to do with allowing more and more fraud. | ||
| And then finally today, we're going to inject five-year-olds, otherwise they can't go to | ||
| schools. | ||
| It's coming. | ||
| It's coming. | ||
| And figure out how to fight it in your own way. | ||
| I will keep fighting with you, and other people will keep fighting with you, but they have | ||
| to know you're willing to fight. | ||
| That is my message on this Friday. | ||
| I hope you have a good weekend. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| No politics this weekend for anybody. | ||
| Join us at RubinReport.Locals.com. | ||
| We're going to cook some stuff. | ||
| We're going to smoke. | ||
| I think we're smoking a spatchcock chicken tonight. | ||
| I'll even put video up of it at RubinReport.Locals.com. | ||
| Let's share some music and food, video games, sports, outdoors, taking a hike. | ||
| That's what we'll be doing over there. | ||
| We'll be back on Monday. | ||
| Thanks for watching everybody. |
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