Speaker | Time | Text |
---|---|---|
What I realized as I've become more part of the right and conservative and I do things with Turning Point or just within the last couple weeks, I hosted this PragerU gala where DeSantis was speaking. | ||
It was at the height of the don't say gay thing. | ||
I'm bringing him on stage. | ||
I introduce him to my husband. | ||
He immediately says congratulations on the kids. | ||
Big smile. | ||
Picture with us. | ||
It's like that shows the difference between community and collective. | ||
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
I am not Dave Rubin. | ||
I have sort of quaffed and sprayed hair. | ||
I am wearing a tailored blazer. | ||
But I am not Dave Rubin. | ||
I am Michael Knowles. | ||
My guest on today's episode of The Rubin Report is Dave Rubin. | ||
Dave Rubin, a New York Times bestselling author and the author of the new book, Don't Burn This Country. | ||
Dave, thank you so much for coming on your show. | ||
Michael, thank you so much for having me on my show. | ||
And before I say anything else, Does it hurt that you have to refer to me as New York Times bestselling author because they did not put you on the list? | ||
Now, your book sold like 10 times what technically should have put you on the list, but they felt they could stick it to you. | ||
For some reason, they didn't stick it to me. | ||
Maybe they're going to stick it to me with this one. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But how does that feel to you? | ||
I mean, we all know that the New York Times is complete nonsense and bunk and propaganda and everything else. | ||
But nonetheless, as someone hosting someone else's show and having to say that, I am very much a non-New York Times bestselling author. | ||
And for a while, we were all joking, and you would say, you wear this as a badge of pride. | ||
Because the New York Times, we all know they're bunk. | ||
The New York Times bestseller list, like all the rest of their newspaper, is an editorial product. | ||
There was actually a court decision about this. | ||
So they really can just pull you off the list no matter how many copies you sell. | ||
So that's one side of it. | ||
But on the other side, and this actually gets to what you talk about in the book. | ||
It does matter. | ||
The fact that the radical left controls all of these institutions will determine Where your book gets placed in the bookstores. | ||
It will determine if it goes on classroom curricula. | ||
It will determine how it's talked about, how it's reviewed. | ||
It really matters. | ||
And we're now just talking about one small subset of just one institution on the left. | ||
This is true of all of the left-wing institutions. | ||
So there's a lot I want to talk about in your book. | ||
But first, because I'm hosting the show, this is my show today, thank you very much. | ||
I want to talk about my favorite part of the book, which actually comes in the middle. | ||
And it's, you know, in the book. | ||
It's a, you know, sort of natural follow-up to Don't Burn This Book, your first book. | ||
And it talks about all sorts of ideas and different parts of philosophy, libertarian philosophy, conservative philosophy. | ||
But what I love is in the middle, you don't just talk about ideas, you talk about doing something. | ||
You talk about not just how we're going to tweak this policy, how we're going to tweak this. | ||
You actually built something. | ||
You yourself, you Dave Rubin, built something called Locals. | ||
Locals now affiliated with Rumble, which is... | ||
Which is a separate, conservative, or at least non-woke institution. | ||
Yeah, non-woke institution. | ||
That's really all it is. | ||
I wouldn't say it's conservative, or libertarian, or progressive, or democrat, or republican, or anything else. | ||
We basically just wanted to be a neutral platform. | ||
And you know, for all the years, you know, Knowles, you and I have been having these chats on each other's shows, regardless of who's hosting what. | ||
For a couple of years now. | ||
And even before I knew you, you know, I was having all of these talks with all of these people and we were talking about free speech and we're being censored on these platforms and we know about de-boosting and shadow banning and all of these other Orwellian terms. | ||
But nobody's doing anything about it. | ||
And it really started hitting me. | ||
It was like, man. | ||
The cavalry ain't coming. | ||
There's nobody coming to save us. | ||
We have to save ourselves. | ||
And you know, it's kind of funny now, four years after having created Locals and since we've merged with Rumble and my idea with Locals, of course, was, hey, I just need a digital home. | ||
I need a place where I own my video. | ||
I own my audio. | ||
I own the user data so that if I ever want to leave Locals, not that I would want to leave, I created it and by the way I think only one creator out of our tens of thousands has ever left and it had nothing to do with Locals, but I thought let me create this thing And then see if other people want it, too. | ||
So we really created it for me first and then we realized, oh, wow, we've got we've actually got a business here. | ||
So this is this is pretty great. | ||
But because otherwise just talking about the stuff and this is an ironic position, I suppose, for two guys that talk for a living, you know, at some point it starts making you crazy. | ||
Right. | ||
If you and I just complain About the Republicans didn't do this, and the Democrats did do this, and wokeism in schools, and gender theory. | ||
But we don't actually start building new institutions. | ||
At the end of the day, we're gonna go nuts. | ||
And by the way, that's why a lot of the talking heads that you see over the years, they get progressively crazier. | ||
Because if you're just screaming about stuff, but not changing stuff, you're going to be crazy. | ||
And since you are hosting my show, I will say something nice about the fine folks at the Daily Wire. | ||
You guys are doing the same freaking thing. | ||
What you guys did with Jeremy's Razors as an attack, instead of just taking, instead of just being attacked, you said, no, we will attack Harry's. | ||
They make up this nonsense. | ||
It had to do with your tweet. | ||
You guys poured, I think, millions of dollars into an incredible campaign. | ||
You're now selling your own razors. | ||
You're launching a $100 million campaign for Daily Wire kids. | ||
That's very much in line with the ideas of the book. | ||
Politicians are not here to save us. | ||
You either better figure out a way to save yourself, or you better find some people who | ||
can help you save yourself together. | ||
Not as a collective, but really as a community. | ||
Not as just, oh, I'm a cog in a machine. | ||
But as, oh, I have shared values with these people. | ||
Let's build some things. | ||
That's why I created Locals. | ||
That's why we merged with Rumble. | ||
That's why we do stuff together. | ||
And that's what people are looking for. | ||
They're not looking for us to just bicker over Marginal tax rates, or even the more existential stuff. | ||
They're not just watching us to have the endless debate about abortion, which of course we can do and we've done before. | ||
They want answers. | ||
That's what I'm interested in. | ||
Otherwise, Knowles, don't you feel that? | ||
Don't you feel that if you just do this every day, you just talk about this stuff every day, but you don't do anything, what's going to stop you from just being a complete talking head, screaming lunatic? | ||
And there's plenty of those. | ||
They're all on MSNBC. | ||
That's right. | ||
This is something that's really refreshing about the book, but more importantly, it's refreshing about what is happening right now, what you're doing with Locals, what we've done with Jeremy's Razors, and now DW Kids. | ||
We're not gonna take our kids to Disney World. | ||
We're gonna take them to Wire World whenever. | ||
I shouldn't even say that, because you know Jeremy's gonna go dump $50 million into that the minute he even hears the idea. | ||
There is this issue on the right, and we're all guilty of it, on the left, You can take a room of a hundred leftists, maybe they have different interests and different points of view, you can get them on board with something. | ||
You can get them to work in concert. | ||
I mean, that's what we're seeing with the woke corporations, and the big tech platforms, and the government, and the media, and the schools. | ||
They all get on the same page, no matter what their slight disagreements might be. | ||
When you get into a room full of right wingers, you get, if it's a hundred right wingers, you're going to get a hundred different opinions and they're going to fight tooth and nail over every issue. | ||
And a lot of those debates really do matter. | ||
A lot of those debates are really important. | ||
But they paralyze you. | ||
They stop you from doing anything. | ||
And so I'm just so happy to see, OK, while we're figuring out whether it's marginal tax rates or it's life and death, while we're doing that, how about we build up some institutions that will even permit us to have that discussion? | ||
Well, you know, the thing is, Michael, you know the joke, it's like if you go to a libertarian conference, you know, in essence, you're just gonna have, you know, 15 opinions, you're gonna have 10 people at the table, 15 opinions on whether you should have driver licenses or not, and then no one ever accomplishes anything, right? | ||
So, but there's a reason, there's a fundamental reason that does happen with people on the right, and it doesn't happen with people on the left. | ||
And it gets to sort of what I just hinted at, the difference between The collective and a community. | ||
They love the collective. | ||
That, you know, we're just pieces of the machine. | ||
All of us. | ||
And we're just completely interchangeable. | ||
And actually, whether you're black or gay or lesbian or blind or whatever else, that matters more than whatever remaining individual thought you have. | ||
Now, on the right, what you want to do is, if you believe in the individual first, that you, Michael Knowles, believe it or not, are capable of logical, thoughtful, reasoned thinking, you have some sense of how you can live your life, and that the system should just exist to allow you to flourish, and then hopefully after you've figured out some stuff for yourself, Maybe you meet a gal that you like, and you start having kids, and then maybe you'll move to a community that some of the people there are somewhat in line with what you believe, and then you can flourish and build businesses up. | ||
That's the bottom-up approach. | ||
They like the other approach, which is there's a machine, now fit into the machine. | ||
And I get why that's attractive to young people. | ||
That, in many ways, is what we're fighting. | ||
That's kind of what the book is about. | ||
We're fighting something that is much bigger than us because it's about the human | ||
condition. People just want to fit in and if the last two years of COVID taught us anything, they | ||
will give up almost everything that is good and true in the name of fitting in. That's what I want to | ||
fight. That's why the word dystopia is in the subtitle because this is a dystopia now. | ||
We are in a futuristic movie. | ||
What happens in every futuristic movie? | ||
Big government, controlling speech. | ||
People are afraid to talk to each other. | ||
People are locked in their houses. | ||
There's a pandemic. | ||
Overreaching government. | ||
It's like, the pieces are all here. | ||
We just need Schwarzenegger to come in and, you know, defend the three-boobed woman. | ||
Right, that poor three-boobed woman. | ||
We've got to protect her. | ||
Won't somebody please think about the three-boobed woman? | ||
Remember they shoot her right up close. | ||
Remember the guy just, yeah. | ||
Yeah, it's not. | ||
You can look that up after you finish this episode. | ||
It's different. | ||
But I love this distinction you draw here between the collective and the community, because very often a lot of talking points, frankly on the right, but just broadly, They deposit that there is the collective and the | ||
individual and they just leave it at that. | ||
But of course, if we're just a bunch of atomized individuals, then the minute that we're all | ||
broken down to the individual level, the left is gonna come in and bring us all together | ||
and collectivize us. | ||
Frankly, in the left's collectivizing scheme, you see this in communist revolutions, you've | ||
seen this for well over a century in the left. | ||
The first thing they do is try to split people down, break up their cultures, break up their | ||
communities, break up their families, and then they can bunch them all together. | ||
And you're saying, no, the individual isn't the end of that. | ||
There's actually, we're human, we're social, obviously we're gonna come together. | ||
But what we want is a flourishing community where we all fit, where we all have a purpose, | ||
where we don't lose our individual selves, unlike what the left is offering, which is | ||
total homogeneity and do what we say or we'll unperson you from society. | ||
Well, Knowles, I'm glad that that part resonated with you because, you know, as someone that is, I still think of myself as roughly new to this side of the aisle, let's say, and as you've long said, I'm going to end up the furthest right of all of us. | ||
You know, that was an important piece for me to take from the first book, but expand upon in this book. | ||
In other words, you know, the first book, which was a defense of classical liberalism, really is a defense of the individual first. | ||
But that isn't enough. | ||
You know, that's one piece and that's an important piece. | ||
And in some ways it's the most important piece, which is why I believe it's the it's the building block. | ||
It's what all As Jordan Peterson would say, it's what all Western civilizations are predicated on, that the individual has sanctity and value in and of itself, right? | ||
But that really isn't enough. | ||
And then this is their great trick. | ||
So their great trick is, OK, you're a person, but really, you know, as we said before, you're just black or you're just gay or whatever. | ||
And it's like, it's not just that we have to say that's not true. | ||
We have to show people why that's not true. | ||
So, you know, for example, look, as you know, and you've been to my house for dinner, Michael Knowles, I am married to a man. | ||
Now that does not equal the sum totality of who I am or who David is or anything else. | ||
Just the way you and your wife, your marriage or your heterosexuality is not, that's not the totality of you, right? | ||
There's a couple other things you got there. | ||
You like cigars. | ||
I like to think of myself as a super straight. | ||
You have. | ||
But I suppose there are other aspects of my personality, sure. | ||
I love this phrase, super straight. | ||
This came out of nowhere because the left, that's another thing the left does. | ||
Because they march on everything sane, now regular straight people have to say that they're super straight just to prove how straight they are. | ||
It's like I'm the He-Man of straight people. | ||
I mention this because what I realized as I've become more part of the right and conservative and I do things with Turning Point or just within the last couple weeks I hosted this PragerU gala where DeSantis was speaking. | ||
It was at the height of the don't say gay thing. | ||
I'm bringing him on stage. | ||
I introduce him to my husband. | ||
He immediately says congratulations on the kids. | ||
Big smile. | ||
Picture with us. | ||
It's like that shows the difference between community And collective. | ||
Because if the right was a bunch of collectivists... | ||
What he, in essence, would want, if you were to believe what they tell you about DeSantis, he would hate gay people, right? | ||
He would be completely against gay people, and it wouldn't matter if I agreed with him on everything else. | ||
If I did not accept and bow to him at every level, I would be out. | ||
But what I have found is, I go to these events, I go speak at Liberty University, the largest evangelical school in the United States, in front of 14,000 kids, and they embrace you for that. | ||
It doesn't mean we agree on every little thing. | ||
It doesn't mean that we're gonna... | ||
All love each other and not judge in any way. | ||
I mean, you know, sir, you know, from a religious perspective, I suppose you should try not to judge, but judgment is part of life. | ||
You know, we all judge every second of the day. | ||
If someone shady looking is walking down the street, you judge them and move the other way. | ||
I mean, you racist, you prejudiced. | ||
Oh, sorry. | ||
I don't want to interrupt. | ||
No, you got it. | ||
You got it. | ||
But that's what they do. | ||
Just to say that, someone would imply, well, what do you mean they look shady? | ||
You must be thinking about their ethnicity. | ||
And it's like, no. | ||
A shady guy? | ||
If I saw some guy with crazy facial things and tattoos everywhere and holding a bat? | ||
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
I've got to get on the other side of the street. | ||
But the point is, there is a plurality on the right. | ||
And I don't know. | ||
I mean, I guess maybe this is what my next book will be about. | ||
Can it hold? | ||
Can this alliance that I'm trying to create, that I think many of us are trying to understand, the more libertarian, the ex-libs, the religious Nationalists. | ||
Can this thing hold? | ||
I think it can if we just turn back to those foundational documents. | ||
But it ain't gonna be easy. | ||
But I'll tell you this, it's a hell of a lot better than what those other guys are offering. | ||
Right, and you do bring up, this is a tricky issue. | ||
I don't know that there has been an answer yet to this coalition. | ||
Can you really fit, frankly I don't know that the conservative coalition even 50 years ago made all that much sense. | ||
You've got the religious right, traditionalists, which are similar but not exactly the same thing. | ||
You've got the libertarians, you've got sort of war hawk Democrats, they became kind of what the neoconservative | ||
movement of the, you know, and you've got all these isms and ists and that, and they all came together | ||
during the Cold War to fight the Soviet Union. | ||
The traditionalists hated the, well the economic, economic first I guess led this thing. | ||
But you had the libertarians hated the collectivism. | ||
Then second in the coalition you had the traditionalists and the religious right, they hated the atheism | ||
and the iconoclasm of the Soviet Union. | ||
Then you had the war hawk Democrats hated the imperial ambitions and they all came together | ||
even though they didn't agree on a whole lot. | ||
Well now, I mean you're not papering over differences here. | ||
There are conservatives who. | ||
Hold to the traditional view of marriage, obviously, who are religious, who check all of these boxes, who simply will not agree with you on your more libertarian positions. | ||
And then the question is, can everyone work together to stop the woke threat without giving up their own views in the meantime? | ||
So, as I said, I don't know that I have the answer to that fully. | ||
Well, I know that I don't have the answer to that. | ||
You don't have the answer. | ||
None of us do, because it's a work in progress, right? | ||
So we're not there yet. | ||
And maybe there is no there there. | ||
Maybe it's just a project that will just continue sort of as long as America is to continue. | ||
But what I would say is, generally speaking, right now, in 2022 America, and this very much is the purpose of the book, we have to defeat the woke thing. | ||
And we have to give the devil his due. | ||
They've done a hell of a lot of damage. | ||
They have destroyed so many things, including imploding Disney right now. | ||
And I basically despise Star Wars at this point because of what they have done to it. | ||
So they've destroyed our educational institutions, our financial institutions. | ||
I mean, they've really wrecked havoc over everything. | ||
We should acknowledge that. | ||
So, okay, there's that. | ||
So it's that versus the rest of us, the groups that you just decided. | ||
Now, I would argue, in essence, we have to put aside some of our differences while we build the new stuff, while we build the new internet pipes, while we build the new businesses, Jeremy's Razors, while we build the new entertainment companies, payment processors, the whole freaking thing. | ||
Now, if we can really build some good things, and of course they're all going to be built in red states, obviously, the question is, after that, if we can get to that there there, Then what do we do? | ||
How do we then, once we've, you know, we've gotten to the promised land, so to speak, now the other issues are going to start popping up again. | ||
Wait a minute, you gay married people and you Catholic traditionalists, we've got a problem here or whatever that is. | ||
Now we're going to have to work through that again. | ||
I think the founding documents. | ||
Give us the best path forward to that, continuing to base it on individual rights. | ||
And I personally respect religious liberty as long as it does not step on my individual liberty. | ||
I know that some religious conservatives don't love that. | ||
And there's reasons for that. | ||
But that's the stuff we have to hash out. | ||
That's worthy of hashing out. | ||
Because the alternative, Michael, is at the end of the day, if we don't do this thing, they won. | ||
We get run over. | ||
They won. | ||
It's over. | ||
Congratulations. | ||
We're all in the gulag together. | ||
And then we're going to really have to live together in small cells and eat gruel. | ||
And it's very cold and wet in there. | ||
And, you know, I don't know that I want to be in there with you. | ||
Well, so, since you bring it up, you bring up this word sanctity, you bring up sort of these religious questions, you mention, you know, we've got to hash this out, Cardinal Manning famously said, all politics, all human conflict basically is theological at the bottom. | ||
One of the more striking points in your book is when we first met each other, Dave, when we first became pals, you were an atheist. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Not exactly an atheist. | ||
No, I am a believer. | ||
There is no question about it. | ||
You're a believer. | ||
I am willing to say that, Knowles. | ||
How did it happen? | ||
Look, there were a couple things. | ||
You know, partly one of the reasons I had never as an adult, I had never said I was an atheist until about 2000. | ||
I think it was if I remember exactly correctly, it was the fall of 2015. | ||
So I am now in 2022. | ||
I'm 45 years old. | ||
So, you know, it's about seven years ago. | ||
I'm in my late 30s. | ||
And I always sort of felt somewhat agnostic, but I always loved logic and reason. | ||
I grew up reading all of Carl Sagan's books. | ||
So I loved sort of, I loved sort of a distant respect for belief in a way, but not like a hardcore belief, something like that. | ||
You know, I also, I come from a secular Jewish family that while we did all of the holidays and traditions, which is basically what kept Jews around for 5,000 years, it's different in terms of the belief, in God is a little bit different than, say, a Catholic. | ||
We like to say secular Judaism is Jew-ish. | ||
You know, emphasis on the ish. | ||
Yeah, and by the way, our good friend Dennis Prager has written many books about this, that maybe that thing just can't last that long, that it's not enough to like Seinfeld and eat bagels and all of those things. | ||
Although those are worthy, those are worthy things. | ||
Man, I made an everything bagel with lox. | ||
The other day, Miami, you can get it. | ||
They say it's all in New York and Jersey. | ||
I know you're a New Yorker originally. | ||
Yes. | ||
You can get a good bagel down here in Miami. | ||
But where did the New York Jews go? | ||
They've all fled now, right? | ||
They're all heading down to the free state of Florida. | ||
All the sane ones now are in Florida and it's just the bananas one still in New York. | ||
But in any essence, in 2015, I started having a bunch of well-known atheists on my show. | ||
Primarily Sam Harris was sort of the first one. | ||
And I just sort of started going into that world and for a long time I never said I was an atheist but a lot of people just kept saying Dave's an atheist because it was just by the nature of the conversations that I was having. | ||
I had Ayaan Hirsi Ali on and Pete Boghossian who wrote a manual for creating atheists and Michael Shermer from Skeptic Magazine. | ||
I know you know all these guys. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And so I just sort of got like sort of caught up in that thing but then eventually I started saying I was an atheist. | ||
I would say a couple things started moving me on this. | ||
First off, as you know, a couple years later I was on tour with Jordan Peterson and we did 120 shows in 20 countries and he was, not only I had read 12 Rules for Life and I had flipped through Maps of Meaning, it's a very intense book, but being on tour with this guy and every night hearing a different speech Related to the importance of belief, and that in many ways, whether you believe you are or not, you are a believer. | ||
So I don't mean this to attack Sam Harris, for example, but Sam Harris says, you know, he's not a believer, he's an atheist, but it's like, he does believe that Trump is the devil. | ||
That's where all of his actions over the last couple of years politically seem to come from. | ||
I don't really mean that. | ||
Wow, he might not believe in God, but he does believe in the devil. | ||
That's a great observation. | ||
I get one, it's one to show, that's what I always say. | ||
Then I heard Jordan say a few things related to belief specifically that I really loved. | ||
One of them, you may have heard this, he was on, this is a little bit later actually so I'm jumping ahead a bit, but he was on Tucker Carlson's Fox Nation show and he was talking about the nature of belief and he said that when he was in his early 20s he decided to tell the truth For the sake of telling the truth that in essence that if you told the truth that that would be the best outcome no matter what doesn't mean that it would be a good outcome because obviously you can tell the truth and they might hang you for it but actually it would be the best outcome that's an incredible leap of faith to believe in truth for truth's sake there's no tangible reason to believe that in many cases there's the reverse of that because we know what happens to truth tellers right you're going to be lambasted and ask Jesus you're going to there's a lot of things that are bad that are going to happen right | ||
But I really love that explanation of truth, that truth for truth's sake is a leap of faith in and of itself. | ||
What a great kernel that is to start with something. | ||
And then, you know, through the year of hearing Jordan talk about this, and really also it wasn't just at a personal level for me, because I do the politics thing that you do as well, You know, I talk about things broadly at a societal level, and it's like, it's not working without belief. | ||
Once you remove God, Nietzsche said, you know, God is dead, but that's a warning to you people. | ||
That's not, you know, people think, oh, God's dead. | ||
Let's do whatever the hell we want. | ||
But it's actually a warning because it's like, man, that hole is big, that hole is big, and you're going to fill it with some other crazy shit. | ||
And congratulations, now boys are girls, non-racists are racists, two plus two is five. | ||
The litany of latinx and all the other nonsensical phrases that we have, that's what we filled it with. | ||
We filled it with secularism on steroids. | ||
It's not to say that secularism and your ability to live as you wish is not important. | ||
Of course it's important. | ||
And I want to live in a largely secular society, obviously. | ||
But we need some guardrails on that. | ||
So I would say, you know, some people's belief is purely, it's purely spiritual. | ||
They feel a very deep spiritual sense of belief. | ||
I wouldn't say that's the primary driver of mine. | ||
I would say it's a logical... | ||
It's a logical, rational and almost necessary need for belief, I would say. | ||
But I certainly feel it more. | ||
Maybe it's a little bit. | ||
I'm 45 now, so this is definitely what I suppose they call middle age. | ||
You young whippersnapper. | ||
And so maybe it's a little bit of that. | ||
Maybe it's also it was one of the things that that made me want to finally have kids after not wanting to have kids for a long time. | ||
There's something going on here that's beyond us, Knowles, and I think societies have to understand that. | ||
Otherwise, the winds of the day will blow over the whole thing every time. | ||
We are in the middle of it right now. | ||
I feel pretty good about that. | ||
I think you're pretty close to it. | ||
What you're really close to here is Is something that so many people on the left refuse to get to, which is humility. | ||
It's just saying, there's something bigger than me. | ||
Maybe I don't have all the answers. | ||
Maybe I need to suppress at least some of my interests and desires for the truth, for truth's sake. | ||
Similar thing happened to me with, you know, I was an atheist for 10 years and I was pretty hardcore about it. | ||
You know, I was pretty firmly atheistic for most of that time. | ||
It was only an intellectual journey. | ||
It was only just reading and logic and arguments that took me from, at least that's how it appeared to me at the time, to go from atheist to being open to that question. | ||
Now I would say there was a little more spiritually going on too. | ||
But it was only after all of that that I started to have really what you'd call religious or spiritual feeling. | ||
And as you described, Dave, The more you do it, the more you do it. | ||
The more it happens to you, the more you practice these kinds of things. | ||
And so this raises, then, a question for the book. | ||
And we're joking about what your next book is. | ||
We joke about how you're going to end up to the right of Mussolini. | ||
And all of us are going to say, Dave, what are you doing? | ||
You've got to come further left. | ||
But a lot of times, people who are on the left, who then move in more conservative circles, they say, I didn't leave my party. | ||
My party left me. | ||
And Bill Maher just came out and said this again. | ||
And certainly that happens sometimes. | ||
But it seems to me, reading your book, something more than that has happened to you. | ||
It's not merely, yes, the left has gone completely insane. | ||
Yes, they've moved very, very far. | ||
But you have changed, too. | ||
Yeah, well, absolutely. | ||
I've changed. | ||
There's there's no doubt about that. | ||
You know, people used to say, oh, your politics change so much. | ||
And then I sort of had that line, you know, I didn't leave the Democrats. | ||
The Democrats left me or I didn't leave liberalism. | ||
Liberalism left me. | ||
But, you know, it's funny when Bill Maher says that now in 2022. | ||
It's like, that's what Ronald Reagan said literally 45 years ago, who was once a California Democrat, to ultimately become the sort of standard-bearer of Republican conservatism. | ||
So, this is something Dennis Prager has talked about for many years as well, and even Shapiro has talked about it. | ||
I got Shapiro once, seven years ago on my show, to admit that in a perfect world, he basically is a classical liberal. | ||
He would never want to be described as a liberal, obviously, and I'm sort of, | ||
that was also a little bit, actually, to fully answer your question, | ||
I also became sort of exhausted by explaining liberalism. | ||
So while at some level, I still, there's nothing that I wrote in the first book | ||
that I don't believe anymore, for me to run around to try to explain constantly | ||
how I am a true liberal and these lefty whack jobs who say that they are liberals are not liberals, | ||
and I have at this point barely any differences with conservatives. | ||
The words all become so crazy that I started giving it up but it also was to get to your point. | ||
People before me have said this. | ||
Ronald Reagan. | ||
I didn't leave the Democratic Party. | ||
The Democratic Party left me. | ||
So something was going on a long time ago. | ||
And that does lead to a little bit of the humility. | ||
David Horowitz is another. | ||
He's like the really famous example of this because he was a lefty, son of Marxists and communists his whole life. | ||
Reagan's reelection. | ||
He says he's going to vote for Reagan. | ||
He was the original why I left the left guy, which is a phrase now associated with me. | ||
But it's like these things have happened before. | ||
And it's not just that I had a shift. | ||
It's not just a political shift. | ||
It is a shift that is more than that. | ||
It is a shift in some ways that is spiritual. | ||
And I would say on the religion thing, to link it back to that, you know, who are the people in the last two years of COVID insanity that didn't lose their minds? | ||
Almost everyone on the left completely lost their mind at every level. | ||
The very same people Who were screaming while Trump was president, I'm not going to take the vaccine. | ||
I don't trust the government. | ||
All of that stuff. | ||
We've all seen the videos of all of the MSNBC hosts and all of the Democrats, Kamala Harris included. | ||
I don't trust the CDC. | ||
And who are these people? | ||
And Trump should fire Fauci. | ||
The second the politics shifted and they had their guy in office, they were saying the complete reverse and also saying it was going to be mandated on you too. | ||
That is somewhat spiritual. | ||
It is somewhat spiritual because the people who stayed sane, they weren't making their decisions based on, oh, I like Trump. | ||
I don't like Biden or I don't like Biden. | ||
I like Trump. | ||
They were making their decisions based on the sovereignty of their mind and their body. | ||
And it's actually quite irrelevant who was in charge politically. | ||
So the people who I found over the last few years didn't go bananas. | ||
And by the way, an awful lot of people did go bananas, many of them atheists. | ||
They proved something to me. | ||
The proof is in the pudding. | ||
So when I meet all of these evangelicals, who the left always tells me hates me, and they're nice and warm and welcoming and happy and come to my shows and hug me and say nice things to me, and then they didn't go COVID crazy? | ||
Yeah. | ||
You think that maybe has a little something to do with the fact that they believe in something and what they believe in is not government? | ||
I think maybe there's something there. | ||
One of the great hoaxes during COVID was that the crazy right-wing Christians, they think they could never die from COVID. | ||
And, of course, the opposite was true. | ||
The reason that, generally speaking, conservative Christians remain sane during COVID is because we know we are going to die. | ||
We're not going to eliminate germs and death from our society. | ||
We were looking at the numbers. | ||
We were looking at the evidence. | ||
We said, you know, I think this is being over exaggerated. | ||
I think this is I actually don't think this poses as great a threat to me, a healthy young guy, as we're being told it is. | ||
I don't think the masks are doing exactly what we were told the masks are doing. | ||
I don't I just don't really I have faith in the eternal things, death and taxes. | ||
I have faith in my God. | ||
I do not have faith in Dr. Fauci. | ||
And it was on the left that you had this neurotic fear of death, this absolutely preposterous, cultish worship and idolization of some bureaucrat in a lab coat. | ||
It's ironic that the people who were accused of fairy tales and make-believe were the most grounded. | ||
They were the most empirical people the whole time. | ||
Well, we could even connect that to something roughly going on right now, which is that the very people who for the last however many years have told us how much we should hate evil corporations, right? | ||
Corporations have too much power over us, and they buy too much political influence, and they must be evil, and they're somehow capitalistic. | ||
That's doubly evil. | ||
Who do they love right now? | ||
They love Disney. | ||
They love the most evil corporation in the world that is trying. | ||
I mean, DeSantis is literally fighting Disney tooth and nail right now to keep their policies out of Floridian's classrooms. | ||
He's the guy that was elected to be executive, chief executive of the state. | ||
Now, you may not like his policies, but that's what his job is. | ||
And that's what I mean about people flipping all of their beliefs based on politics. | ||
And you can't disconnect that from people that don't have a belief in something else. | ||
If you just believe that on any given day, whatever happens, whatever happens politically or culturally, that's reality. | ||
You are going to be freaking crazy, especially in an age of algorithms and big tech and bots and everything else. | ||
If your if your worldview is this got a lot of retweets, that guy said the thing and he's wearing the lab coat and the rest of it. | ||
And the fact that, you know, and the book does go quite heavy into this, too. | ||
The mainstream media has lied to us about absolutely everything. | ||
So now you take a bunch of people who maybe don't have a very strong original Say base view of the world. | ||
They haven't figured out if they believe or they don't believe. | ||
They're not sure if they believe in individual rights or what they really believe. | ||
You take them, they're already sort of shaking. | ||
Now you take a pandemic, you throw it on top of that. | ||
Now they're really kind of crazy and scared and everything else. | ||
And then you take a media that has literally lied about everything from Hunter Biden to Brett Kavanaugh as a racist, to the Covington kids, to Kyle Rittenhouse as a white supremacist, to very fine people on both sides, to the litany, to Jussie Smollett. | ||
We could do this all day. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, of course you're going to end up with a population that is half insane. | ||
Or a population that half of it is insane. | ||
Right, right. | ||
You bring up your governor down there in Florida. | ||
You brought him up a few times now, Dave. | ||
So, I have to ask, we're having this wonderful, religious, cultural, philosophical conversation. | ||
And by the way, you're a great host, I just want to say. | ||
Really great host, by the way. | ||
unidentified
|
Stop it. | |
Come on, get out of here. | ||
You're going to make me blush. | ||
Come on, if I weren't so tan, I'd blush. | ||
But I want to put all that good stuff aside for a second and talk about Rough, hard, nuts and bolts politics, because this is a big theme of the book and what we're talking about here. | ||
What are you going to do about it? | ||
You've got a right wing right now that doesn't have very much holding it together, and the conservatives are becoming more conservative, and the libertarians are becoming more libertarian. | ||
We don't have the old Soviet Union to hold us together. | ||
The left is getting so much more aggressive, they barely see any distinction between anyone on the right anyway. | ||
They want to just kill us all and salt the earth on which we once stood. | ||
Is there someone who can bring us together in 2024, say, whether that's your governor, whether that's Trump, whether that's someone else in the country, is there someone who can do it or do we need to wait for a new candidate? | ||
Well, first, as I try to make the argument in the book, you know, politics is not going to save us here. | ||
So the stuff that's going to save us is what we started talking about, which is the build new things, figure out your community and your life and all that. | ||
However, politics is not nothing. | ||
There is a reason that we do this for a living. | ||
And even if we want, even if in the world that you and I, Michael, want to live in, politics should be small enough to fit, you know, in a little box that we can tuck away in our pocket. | ||
That's not what we have right now. | ||
So we have to fight for that, let's say. | ||
And at the end of the day, the size of that thing may be a little bit different for the two of us. | ||
I would say this about DeSantis. | ||
Look, it is not going to get better than him. | ||
It really isn't. | ||
In an American context of politics, with a deeply corrupt media, I would say at this point an evil corporate press. | ||
You are not going to get a better guy than this. | ||
He's 42, 43 years old, military background. | ||
He is fearless in fighting the media. | ||
I've now, I've had dinner with him a few times and I've spoke to him a couple of times and I've listened, I've gone to events where he's spoken at. | ||
And I can tell you this guy, he does not want to be king. | ||
He does not want to be your ruler. | ||
He's a guy that sort of it doesn't even sound at some level like he wants to be president. | ||
Like he really sounds like a guy that should be. | ||
And I guess this is a little bit of the Trump thing that he should be running a business. | ||
He's like, I say things, I make decisions. | ||
We see what happens. | ||
And then, you know, I do it again. | ||
He doesn't get affected by polls. | ||
He's strong. | ||
He's picking the right fights. | ||
You know, he's. | ||
You know, and I say all this without, I don't worship politicians. | ||
I obviously, I happen to, I like and admire the guy, obviously. | ||
But I like and admire him because of the reasons that, because of the fact that he wants to mostly stay out of our lives. | ||
The point of the Don't Say Gay Bill H1557, which again has the word gay isn't in it, and they could have just as easily called it the Don't Say Straight Bill, because you're not allowed to talk about straight sex with a second grader, obviously, you morons. | ||
The point of the bill was to keep the government out of these things, that state employees shouldn't be discussing these things with kids. | ||
It's not more government. | ||
It's less government, actually. | ||
It's the government reining in what state employees can do. | ||
So that to me is the type of thing that we want. | ||
Now we have a great problem, I would say, a good problem here in Florida, | ||
which is that he's up for reelection, obviously in November, he's gonna win by a landslide. | ||
I think he's, well, he's gonna win, and I hope and I believe it will be by a landslide. | ||
And then what I hope happens from that is that landslide then really causes the states | ||
to start going like dominoes, one by, you know. | ||
We got the Yunkin win, it was pretty damn close. | ||
DeSantis will win by more. | ||
Hopefully Texas stays red. | ||
Tennessee's obviously gonna stay red, you're gonna be fine. | ||
But then some of the places that could go either way, a Colorado, Indiana, okay. | ||
Uh, that they're going to fully go red. | ||
And then it doesn't mean that everyone in those red states is going to have every perfect Republican Party platform. | ||
I always remind, and I write about him in the book in a different context, but everyone thinks and knows that Rudy Giuliani obviously is a conservative. | ||
Rudy Giuliani happens to be pro-choice, but no one's doubting that he's a conservative and that you would want Rudy Giuliani on your side, regardless of the, you know, the bad hair dye dripping down his head and some of the yelling and everything else. | ||
I mean, he's a good guy. | ||
You would want him on your side. | ||
He's a fighter. | ||
So I want DeSantis to crush here. | ||
And then I suppose after crushing here, I'm crushing here, that then he is the best candidate for 24. | ||
The Trump thing is what confuses this. | ||
Would the best situation be that Trump is the bodyguard, run the rallies, fight for the platform and the party in the country and let DeSantis go through? | ||
That's the best situation. | ||
Can Trump do that? | ||
Does he want to do that? | ||
Does he want to put his ego aside to do that? | ||
I'm not sure. | ||
And the other problem with the Trump thing, and I look forward to interviewing him again And I hope if you interview him that you could ask him this directly, which is that the fear with the Trump thing, I think there's two real things, which is one, would the machine allow him to win? | ||
Right. | ||
Right. | ||
Whatever the machine is. | ||
Would it even be possible? | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
Would it even be possible? | ||
That's number one. | ||
And number two, even if you accept that the machine would, whatever I mean by that, The base of the Democrats is so depressed right now. | ||
Their candidate has dementia and the backup woman is, I think, has the equivalent, let's say, IQ of maybe a sixth grader. | ||
She was polling at zero in her own party. | ||
Everything is a mess right now. | ||
Inflation, gas prices, they made up the war, the other thing. | ||
It's all terrible. | ||
But suddenly, if Trump runs, you can probably get five million extra people to show up out of the woodwork just because they hate Trump. | ||
So Trump really has to acknowledge those things. | ||
And again, that's not a knock on Trump. | ||
And I really would ask him that to his face, what he thinks about that. | ||
But all of that being put aside, I think there's such a rich opportunity for a truly interesting, wide tent Republican Party right now. | ||
But it's going to be work for us, man. | ||
It really is. | ||
I love your point too about, yeah, obviously you want a good presidential candidate. | ||
You hope it could be this guy or that guy. | ||
But even before that, you get a big win in Virginia, and then you get a big win in Florida. | ||
And especially in Florida, DeSantis has done a pretty good job. | ||
selling the political agenda of the parental rights and education bill of going after these | ||
woke corporations. | ||
And so you're seeing trickle effects of that all throughout the rest of the country that | ||
that's really what we've got to focus on right now. | ||
If you can turn the country, you can turn the states. | ||
You're really setting the stage for a much larger national win. | ||
Now we've been talking about. | ||
Let me just say one thing real quick, because your own life is an example of this. | ||
We had that conversation in my backyard in L.A. | ||
where we said we were going to stay and fight. | ||
The next day you announced you were leaving and you were moving to Tennessee. | ||
Okay, fine. | ||
I tried to stay and fight. | ||
It was a fool's effort. | ||
I accept that. | ||
It's all good now. | ||
I'm in free Florida. | ||
You're in free Tennessee. | ||
But the point is, don't you feel in the year plus, about a year and a half, I think, that you've been in Tennessee, don't you now feel, and this is the way it's supposed to be, this is federalism, That the state that you live in is actually far more important than the federal government, especially when we have a federal government as inept as this one. | ||
So that's all good, actually. | ||
I tell my friends who are in L.A., I've still got a lot of friends in L.A., a lot of friends in New York, I have a lot of friends in the swamp in D.C., and they were complaining about the masks in the restaurant and the vaccine requirements and COVID, when will COVID be over? | ||
And I would tell them, I'm sorry, I don't really know what you're talking about. | ||
I know what you're talking about because I travel and so I have to be in DC for a night or two or New York or wherever. | ||
But in my day to day life, COVID has been over for a year now, more than a year now. | ||
And so you're totally right on that. | ||
It's really important to focus on those states. | ||
Hopefully that changes the country. | ||
Before we go, One, the book is very, very funny. | ||
The book represents this very interesting kind of evolution of your thought from the first one to the next one. | ||
I hope there's going to be another one. | ||
So beyond just predictions about the future of the country or the future of the conservative movement, do you have any predictions? | ||
Seeing how your views have grown from the first book to the second one, do you have any inkling, any intuition of where you might be headed in your own thought? | ||
Spiritual, cultural, political, and where that next book is going to be. | ||
Knowles, you're a fine interviewer. | ||
You're a fine, fine interviewer. | ||
Stop it. | ||
Well, I do, obviously, and I think that that will probably be what the third book is about. | ||
Although everything being equal, if the ideas in this here book take off, we wouldn't need a third book. | ||
That would be my preference. | ||
It really would be. | ||
You know, we can all talk about these things and then they seemingly get worse year after year. | ||
The preference would be, hey, we built a whole bunch of new shit. | ||
It's time to move on. | ||
I'll be on my boat. | ||
Yeah, exactly. | ||
Get the old book. | ||
But I do have some thoughts on that. | ||
I mean, I'll tell you one that that I've been thinking a lot about at a very personal level that is also related to all of this, which is so, you know, David and I have been together for 13 years. | ||
We've been married for seven and a half years, something like that. | ||
We're having two kids. | ||
And it was funny because when I made this announcement publicly, I got, I would say, 99% love. | ||
Truly. | ||
And this is one of those things where the internet is very hard to gauge what's going on because my phone's blowing up, texts, phone calls, all of the public people that we all know, everyone basically congratulated me either publicly or privately, said wonderful things. | ||
There were two or three blue check people on the right in the in the more religious circles of the right that that tweeted some I thought somewhat nasty things. | ||
And then you get just like a whole bunch of anonymous trolls. | ||
And one of the one of the things that was interesting about that, you know, I won't even say all anonymous trolls. | ||
You get a lot of anonymous people. | ||
Then you get some people expressing some legitimate religious points, which I'm happy to get into if you want. | ||
And then you get the trolls. | ||
OK, I got a lot of people saying to me, I'm so sorry that you had to deal with this over the last week. | ||
You know, so much hate in such a beautiful time. | ||
You're trying to expand your family and all this stuff. | ||
And it was kind of funny because I'm used to the internet game, like you're used to the internet game. | ||
And if I was to pay attention to what trolls or anonymous people are saying all day long, Yeah, you'd get nothing done. | ||
Yeah, that would be it. | ||
I would get nothing done and I'd probably be in a mental institution. | ||
I'd be in a padded cell just scrolling mentions on Twitter all day, which actually is where most people do their tweeting from. | ||
So it was mostly love, but it really did Well, first, it was mostly love, but secondly, people kept saying, you see, all these people on the left kept saying, see these people on the right, they really hate you, you fucking asshole. | ||
Pardon my French, it's my show. | ||
But the reason I say it that way is the people who purport to be the tolerant people, | ||
even in a moment like this, were being meaner in a way than the religious people | ||
who sometimes weren't acting so religiously. | ||
So I got no love, literally no love from anyone on the left, no mainstream gay magazine or MSNBC or whatever said, | ||
oh, here's this interesting political commentator who wrote this bestselling book. | ||
He's having kids, that's an interesting cultural moment. | ||
No, it was endless hate from them, nothing but hate. | ||
Not one liberal commentator that you and I both know messaged me privately or anything, | ||
but I get all this love from the conservatives and then some trolls come with it. | ||
Anyway, I mentioned this because it did make me think that as we talk about this new alliance, say on the right, | ||
well, I'm gonna have a family now. | ||
And what comes with having a family is very much what's in the book. | ||
You're an individual, now you have a community, then you have a larger community around you. | ||
You know, will there be work that I will have to do to show these people What the value of my life or what freedom is or what pluralism is or something? | ||
You know, when I had a Ben Shapiro on my show the first time, the first time I ever had him on the show, and I don't think we had met or we had tweeted at each other. | ||
Maybe I don't think we had met. | ||
And he said this thing about that he wouldn't bake me a cake for my gay wedding. | ||
And it's like, I've had kosher cakes, they're dry. | ||
Nobody wants the kosher cakes. | ||
Nobody wants that cake. | ||
Yeah, you need some butter in there or whatever. | ||
They're dry. | ||
What I said to him was, and I've said this repeatedly to him over the years, that my personal belief is that if I live as a decent human being on this earth, in a good relationship to the best of my ability and I raise decent children and try to be a good member of the community and all of those things, which I'll do completely imperfectly, as I suspect you do imperfectly too, That over time, if Ben and I interview each other and do whatever we do for 50 years, when I'm 82 and Ben's 77, that he may, although he maybe will never say it, maybe will at an individual level have come around and go, man, you know, that conversation that Dave and I had 50 some odd years ago, | ||
His life had meaning, it had value, it brought something to this world. | ||
So that's why whatever disagreement, it's not even disagreement, whatever difference you and I might have theologically, let's say, it doesn't matter that much to me because I think we all also operate, we can operate in the realm of ideas and then we can operate in the realm of reality that is right here. | ||
And I don't think, as I said before, I don't think you want to just do this one. | ||
You do have to do both. | ||
But I think there's other ways to To show the world what you are, something like that. | ||
And I think that will be a bit of my challenge going forward, really. | ||
And by the way, it's not just me. | ||
You know, a guy who works with you, who I think is a fantastic thinker, Spencer Clavin, is getting married to Josh in the next little while. | ||
Wait, Spencer Clavin's gay? | ||
That's what I read once somewhere. | ||
I'm not sure Josh is, but Spencer is. | ||
And you know, Spencer is very, you know, he lives in Tennessee. | ||
Tennessee is a little more religious conservative, let's say, than Miami, Florida, where I am. | ||
Here I am in a fairly conservative place, but it's a little more ethnically mixed. | ||
It's a little more sort of New York Republican mixed, something like that. | ||
So a guy like Spencer is going to have a real challenge in those things. | ||
But that's what life's about. | ||
So that alliance that we were talking about before, it's not just an idea. | ||
It's not just an alliance of ideas for me. | ||
It's actually an alliance of, I'm going to have to put my best foot forward in that. | ||
I'm going to have to live in that thing. | ||
And by the way, even if it does not work out exactly as I hope it will, and the future's not written, I know it's better than the other thing. | ||
Because I will not live on my knees as a slave to a bunch of people who think they own me because of an immutable characteristic. | ||
I just simply won't do it. | ||
It's funny, I guess it's not really funny, but when you mention the announcement, not only did your Twitter blew up, my Twitter blew up. | ||
And a lot of people wanted me to publicly condemn you. | ||
And I said, listen, if I'm going to condemn my friends, I'm going to condemn my friends privately, darn it. | ||
I'm not going to condemn them publicly. | ||
If I'm going to go after Shapiro or you or whoever else. | ||
And I think in part, this is because on Twitter, everyone is just Just a box, right, on Twitter everyone. | ||
It's quite clear. | ||
I've made no secret of my Catholicism. | ||
Catholic Church is clear. | ||
Not just about homosexuality, but surrogacy generally, IVF for married couples. | ||
It's clear. | ||
You're pretty limited to the things that you can do in the boudoir, and I think Norm Macdonald... Sorry, but the irony of that, without getting too deep on this, is that the Catholic Church itself has made fairly egregious... | ||
Errors, to put it lightly, related to some of those things. | ||
That's actually not, that's not even me, that's just a sort of a factual statement. | ||
The point being that we all live between a set of beliefs and a set of realities, something like that. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
And even in that case, there's a line from La Rochefoucauld, which I always come back to, which is, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. | ||
You know, this idea that when people screw up, but they're And, you know, not if you're living as a liar or as a cynic, but, you know, so it's not really overt hypocrisy, but when people screw up when they sin, when they err, that is a human thing to do. | ||
And so there is this idea of holding a standard that you are going to fail to uphold a lot of the time. | ||
When I was so curious when I saw these people say, I want you to come out and publicly condemn your friend. | ||
And I thought, why? | ||
What is the purpose of all of this? | ||
And I don't think I really have quite an answer for that. | ||
I could have an answer if someone's were mealy-mouthed or didn't know what they believed. | ||
But frankly, all of our beliefs grow over time too. | ||
I mean, there is a world, when I say you could end up to the right of Genghis Khan or something, | ||
I'm only half kidding. | ||
You could end up in a position where your views on the nature of sex. | ||
I'm not saying you're going to, like, not be gay or something. | ||
But even your views on that could be different. | ||
And we all confront that. | ||
I mean, when I think about my own behavior, when I think about my own life, my views have changed considerably. | ||
And so when you're talking about a coalition, the first part of having a coalition is You know, having some loyalty to one another. | ||
Recognizing that your friend is different than the guy who's trying to kill you and your friend. | ||
unidentified
|
Michael, it's very easy. | |
If we want to find enemies all day long, there is no shortage of enemies. | ||
We will find them every time we open up our phone. | ||
We'll find them every time we walk out of our house. | ||
We'll find them every time we turn on the TV. | ||
So, you know, actually, my Twitter was so out of control those couple days that, honestly, I don't think you condemned me publicly, and I appreciate you for doing that. | ||
No, I don't do that. | ||
I also thought, I said, wait, you want me to stand up and be a big, strong guy by piling on to my friend publicly? | ||
You know, and what's the point of that? | ||
That makes me a big, strong guy? | ||
No, that makes me a coward. | ||
That makes me a weakling. | ||
But, you know, because the other piece of this is how, and this very much is in the book related to the big tech stuff, is that the algorithms and the way we all behave has been so supercharged and dysregulating for all of us. | ||
So think about this. | ||
Let's make it about another topic altogether. | ||
Let's just say you and I were doing a show and we were debating tequila versus bourbon. | ||
Scotch. | ||
Scotch, okay. | ||
I'm still a little unclear on the difference between bourbon and scotch. | ||
Do you want to clean that up for me real quick? | ||
We absolutely, yes. | ||
I mean, I could do it intellectually, but it's better to have a taste. | ||
Okay. | ||
So let's say we did a video, and I think we've done, we did this for the game show on your channel once. | ||
I love tequila, you love scotch. | ||
Okay, great. | ||
And every time we're together, I have tequila, you have scotch. | ||
Now we could do that video, and we could agree to disagree and have a ball and be plastered by the end, and let's say that video got a million views. | ||
And 900,000 people just don't comment. | ||
They just don't comment because they're like, oh, I watched it. | ||
Reuben likes tequila. | ||
Knowles likes scotch. | ||
Zippity-damn-doo-dah. | ||
I'm going, you know, to buy coffee. | ||
What happens now is you've got 100,000 people that comment, and out of those 100,000 people, the type of people, I mean we know this, the psychological makeup of the people that comment is going to be more drawn towards the negative, and then the comments that are the most negative are going to be the ones that get the most likes. | ||
So then if you then, now a week passes, it's got a million views, it's got let's say 100,000 comments, 90,000 of those comments are completely terrible, I like tequila because I'm gay. | ||
You like scotch because you're a heterosexual supremacist. | ||
Blah, blah, blah. | ||
All of these awful things. | ||
And then the average person, just the average person, happens to click on the video. | ||
And before they even watch what we're doing, they look at the comment section and all they see is hate. | ||
All they see is the endless hate. | ||
And that, I think, relates back to exactly what we're talking about. | ||
The average person that exists on planet Earth, especially in the United States of America, is just trying to make some sense of this thing and just trying to do it in a way that is hopefully somewhat decent and allows you to, you know, listen to some music you like and eat some food you like and hopefully be with some people you love. | ||
That's it. | ||
But the internet has, and I mean dysregulated, is the word. | ||
That's a great point. | ||
It has completely skewed our ability to see reality for what it is. | ||
So my reality, again, on that day, to link it back, was, oh, I'm getting all this love. | ||
My phone's blowing up. | ||
I don't pay that much attention to the mentions. | ||
And then suddenly, a few hours go by and I see friends texting me saying, I'm sorry, you're dealing with all the hate. | ||
And I'm going, what hate? | ||
What hate? | ||
So that's one of those things. | ||
But Knowles, I do know. | ||
That while we may disagree on tequila and scotch, we do agree on Frankie Valli. | ||
Well, we do agree on Frankie Valli, among other things, one of the all-time greats, a great way to facilitate while you're drinking and chatting. | ||
And actually, speaking of one of our drinking buddies, Spencer Clavin, he made this point, he made to me once the same point that you're making right now, which is, So much of our political rancor right now is just trying to come to grips with the internet, is just trying to come to grips with this explosion of technology in the way that we can all be manipulated with that. | ||
It reminds me, you were talking about that bill in Florida, the Parental Rights and Education Bill. | ||
The vast majority of people don't think kindergartners should be taught about sex in history class. | ||
Well, they don't have history class, in alphabet class. | ||
I'm pretty sure in history class they don't learn about history, so it's okay when they're a little older. | ||
You make a good point. | ||
But the vast majority of Americans don't think that. | ||
The chasm between the vast majority of ordinary people and the thin It's sort of bipartisan ruling elite, it's obviously on the left, but there are some Republicans who go along with it, who control all of those institutions. | ||
It's huge, and they are inundating us with this idea that it's somehow controversial not to teach kids about sex in kindergarten. | ||
I just, I love your sort of saying, hold on, pull yourself out of Twitter for a second. | ||
You talk about, and we're running out of time, so we'll have to wrap it, you have to buy the book and just read about it yourself. | ||
Great book, great book. | ||
When you go on your sabbatical, you go on for 30 days, you don't pay attention to anything anymore, and then I've hosted your shows when you've come back, and you say, what happened? | ||
I threw my phone in the ocean for 30 days. | ||
That is rejuvenating. | ||
It is important to remember that there is There is a real society we're living in with real people who actually generally do kind of agree on things and do kind of broadly have this idea that there's truth and falsehood and we kind of know it. | ||
And not to get completely lost and manipulated by a small handful of bad actors with a ton of political power that we all, in the sane kind of center to right, are unifying to try to push back against. | ||
Knowles, wouldn't that be a dystopia? | ||
Wouldn't that be a dystopia? | ||
That we all sort of roughly, not all of us, but like there's this real majority of people that roughly understand the mess of the gestalt of life and that we can't quite see it because the AI, the algorithms, SkyNet turned on, the machine wants more clicks, and it can get more clicks off more clicks, and that we're all playing this game that none of us really understand, but we all kind of know it's fixed, and we don't know how much it leaks out into reality, but what that all leads to... | ||
And I will tease this. | ||
You're the guest host of my show, but one thing that I have not said publicly before, but I want to drop some first-time info on the Rubin Report. | ||
My goal, and I hope I can stick to this, I want to close my Twitter on January 1st of 2023. | ||
I have over a million followers, I have wasted a lot of my life on there, but it's also been very good for me. | ||
But there is something about the Twitter game in particular that I think is really breaking people in a really weird way. | ||
I think I've roughly managed to stay sane in it, but I think if enough of us just say enough. | ||
You know, Tucker Carlson right now is banned from Twitter, and has been banned from Twitter for a couple weeks. | ||
Nobody's talking about it. | ||
The number one host in the history of cable news is not allowed to be on Twitter because he said, in essence, that men have penises and women have vaginas. | ||
And he's not allowed to be on Twitter, on top of the Hunter Biden laptop story and everything else. | ||
So what are we doing? | ||
We're giving energy to something that is trying to destroy us. | ||
We're feeding the plant in Little Shop of Horrors. | ||
Then it's eating our friends and we're going, hey, why are you doing that? | ||
We're tweeting about it. | ||
It was pretty close. | ||
Yeah, but I do love that idea. | ||
We say, Twitter is the devil. | ||
It's the worst thing ever. | ||
It's completely destroying our country. | ||
Hold on. | ||
I've just got to finish my tweet. | ||
Tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet. | ||
Of course, you're putting your time, your energy. | ||
That's actually, that is a big deal, Dave. | ||
If you go off of Twitter, it reminds me, you talk about it in the book, of going off of Patreon. | ||
I mean, that was a big deal. | ||
You took a big financial hit. | ||
And then you didn't, and then you prospered. | ||
And so I hope the same thing can be true on Twitter and for all of us as we build a new culture, build new institutions, and we buy this book. | ||
Don't burn this country surviving and thriving in our woke dystopia. | ||
Dave, thank you so much for coming on the Rubin Report. | ||
I really appreciate it. | ||
We're gonna have to have you back sometime. | ||
Knowles, I'm sending you a bottle of tequila. | ||
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. |