Oct. 9, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| The only way to get out of it is, well, it's not the only way. | ||
| The best way, or one of the key ways, is disseminate what we stand for, which is why this PragerU, which is why I'm writing the Rational Bible, which is why you do what you do. | ||
| That is why, by the way, they try to shut us down. | ||
| They know we can undo. | ||
| Why is it a big deal if you go to a college campus, or I do, or Ben Shapiro, or Jordan Peterson, or Candace Owens? | ||
| Why do they give a damn? | ||
| They have four years to indoctrinate, we get 90 minutes. | ||
| Because they know in their heart we can undo four years in 90 minutes | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the founder of PragerU as well as the author of the brand new book the rational | ||
| Bible Deuteronomy God | ||
| blessings and curses Dennis Prager | ||
| Welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| I love being with you. | ||
| Great to be there. | ||
| Dennis, I am always happy to talk to you. | ||
| My first question is, you've written, according to my research, 3,501 books. | ||
| This is your 2,477th appearance on the Rubin Report. | ||
| Which one of those would you say is a higher accolade for you? | ||
| If they were to put one on my tombstone, it will definitely be the Rubin Report appearances. | ||
| When you weigh, I mean, think about it. | ||
| You weigh the Bible and then the Dave Rubin report. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| How many books is this for you, for real? | ||
| I mean, this has got to be... You know what? | ||
| This is very interesting. | ||
| I have no idea what this will say about me, positive, negative, or neither. | ||
| I don't know how many books I've written, but I do know exactly how many countries I have visited. | ||
| How many countries have you visited? | ||
|
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131. | |
| Wow. | ||
| Slovakia was my 131st last year. | ||
| What's remaining for you? | ||
| I mean, do you have anything that you haven't gotten to yet? | ||
| Okay, it's getting tough. | ||
| It's getting tough. | ||
| Rwanda. | ||
| I haven't been to Rwanda. | ||
| Haven't been to Mongolia. | ||
| I mean, I've been to 20 African countries, but I think there are 40. | ||
| So, you know. | ||
| I've been on my mission to get you to move to Florida, but I see Rwanda is in your heart. | ||
| That is very funny. | ||
| Rwanda was for a visit. | ||
| Florida... Hey, by the way, are you worried about the hurricane? | ||
| So as we're recording this right now, you know I'm in Miami, so it looks like it hit the West Coast unbelievably hard, like Category 5. | ||
| My folks have a place over there that we're just praying isn't going to be destroyed. | ||
| But to bring it to a little bit of the politics, and then we'll get into the book, I mean, DeSantis is doing everything possible, but the media is just waiting. | ||
| Are you feeling that? | ||
| Were you talking about that on your radio show this morning, that the media is just waiting? | ||
| For one disaster to really strike so they can say this is the thing and he's incompetent and he's evil and awful. | ||
| Like they would love for destruction basically is what I'm saying. | ||
| I want you to know that it is not easy for me to say I agree with you in this case. | ||
| I think the left's hatred of us is so great that a certain amount of joy Would be in their hearts, they wouldn't express it, of course, if Florida were hurt. | ||
| And by the way, I don't think it's symmetrical. | ||
| I loathe what the Democrats have done to where I still live in California. | ||
| It would bring me no joy if some natural disaster hit California. | ||
| I don't think there's symmetry in the hatred. | ||
| Well, that symmetry, or that asymmetry, as you put, that's sort of connected to what this book is about, because it's about God and the Bible and goodness and things of that nature, and you know that I'm sort of, you, as I sort of call you, you're my quote-unquote rabbi, and we're actually taping this right in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, so this is an important week for the Jewish people to reflect on life and all that stuff, and you've reconnected me with a lot of these things. | ||
| That there's a reason for that asymmetry, I think. | ||
| That politics is their worldview while, generally speaking, more conservative-leaning people, and I don't mean that purely in a conservative sense politically, but conservative-leaning people have another ideology. | ||
| So it does make sense, right? | ||
| I would go further. | ||
| We have another life. | ||
| It's so interesting you should mention that. | ||
| So, I think you know, but I'm sure most of your viewers don't, or listeners, I have been conducting the Jewish High Holy Day services as if I were a rabbi. | ||
| I'm not ordained, but as, so to speak, a rabbi for 15 years. | ||
| This was the 15th year. | ||
| About 400 people attend. | ||
| Oh, you've attended, actually. | ||
| I've been many times. | ||
| Actually, the first time I was there was about four years ago or so. | ||
| You were giving the sermon, and you were discussing something about same-sex couples, and you referenced David and I being at dinner at our house a few days before. | ||
| You didn't even know I was there. | ||
| I did not even know you were there. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right. | |
| But I've been many times, and it's standing room only, and it's wonderful what you do, ordained or not. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So, I want to comment on your point about the different life. | ||
| So, first, by the way, I just want, for those interested, they can watch my service anytime they want till January 1st, now or anytime, at salemnow.com. | ||
| Just so they should know. | ||
| And the music is incredible, by the way. | ||
| You get people from the LA Philharmonic and all sorts of stuff. | ||
| The whole thing, I explain everything, non-Jews watch it even more than Jews do, because there are a lot more non-Jews than Jews, but it appeals to everybody. | ||
| So anyway, I actually noted on my show, when I returned from my two-day break, how important it is in my life that I have another life, a life of religion. | ||
| And when one doesn't have that, And everything, everything is secular. | ||
| There is a real danger that, and this is the danger of the left, part of it, everything is then politics. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| The purpose of your life, the meaning, it's your interest, it's your passion. | ||
| It's not my interest, it's not my passion. | ||
| I'm passionate about the ultimate questions of life, which is why I'm writing my Bible Because if people understand the first five books, which are by far the most important in all of the Bible, Jesus would have said that as Jesus, and as a Jew, which he was, the most important books actually ever written. | ||
| You will find this fascinating. | ||
| I just learned this, sadly, after I'd already completed Deuteronomy. | ||
| It's the fifth book, but it's my third. | ||
| I didn't go in order. | ||
| And you will find this fascinating, as I did. | ||
| The founders of the country cited Deuteronomy more than any other religious or secular work in their writings and in their speeches. | ||
| That's how much this book influenced the creation of the freest country ever made. | ||
| And so that should be, if one needs one, and I think does one need one, most people never heard of Deuteronomy. | ||
| But it is a phenomenal work of the five books. | ||
| It's Moses' summary of everything. | ||
| This, Israelites, this humanity, is what is important. | ||
| I'll give you one example. | ||
| So I wrote a column for Fox giving seven great insights just from the book. | ||
| Do not show partiality in judgment. | ||
| There is a specific law In both Exodus and Deuteronomy, you cannot, it's specific, you'll love this Dave, you cannot favor the poor man who comes into your court. | ||
| Justice is justice. | ||
| It is like a law against social justice. | ||
| There is only justice. | ||
| It's basically, it's a law against equity. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's sort of... Exactly! | |
| Equity and justice are mutually exclusive. | ||
| Equity and liberty are mutually exclusive. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| Give me one more that's in that column. | ||
| Okay, so another one here. | ||
| So, do not be afraid of anyone. | ||
| Only fear God. | ||
| Fear of God is the antidote to fear of man. | ||
| I know it because it's operative in my life. | ||
| I don't give a damn about what the New York Times writes about me. | ||
| It means nothing. | ||
| I sleep perfectly fine that night. | ||
| I don't walk around fearing anyone and you don't know how liberating that is. | ||
| That is why one of the three mottos of the country is in God we trust. | ||
| Not we trust will take care of us. | ||
| It's God who matters and of course man matters, obviously, but not in terms of fear. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| If you don't fear God, you will fear man. | ||
| Humans fear. | ||
| It is part of our makeup. | ||
| It is impossible not to have fears. | ||
| But you can liberate yourself from it if you fear the right party, which is God. | ||
| I'll give you another one. | ||
| Let me just ask you something on that before you continue. | ||
| Did you always have that within you? | ||
| I mean, I think you've always had it for the now eight or so years that I've known you, and people know this story, but at the height of COVID, When I dragged you out to a Trump rally and you literally said to me, unvax you and unvax me, I hope I get COVID here. | ||
| And then of course the media all called for you to die and you eventually did get COVID and you survived much to their chagrin. | ||
| But the point is you weren't being dominated by fear. | ||
| Was that always in you or was that something you learned very early? | ||
| Yeah, I learned it. | ||
| I learned it and imbibed it. | ||
| It became part of my nature. | ||
| By the way, I just want to make clear, it was partially tongue in cheek. | ||
| About wanting COVID. | ||
| What I did want was a way to get antibodies. | ||
| Yes, you said that, for sure. | ||
| And, you know, I'm not an idiot, obviously, but I turned out right. | ||
| I turned out right when I said that the lockdowns were the greatest international mistake in human history. | ||
| And they were. | ||
| They were devastating. | ||
| Keeping kids out of school for two years was a crime. | ||
| Literally a crime. | ||
| It was a crime against children. | ||
| Look, we both feel this way. | ||
| I don't have to belabor the point, but let's put it this way. | ||
| I wrote a piece about 20 years ago, How the Left Keeps Me Religious. | ||
| You'd love it. | ||
| You should take a look at it. | ||
| That might explain my religious revival over here. | ||
| Yes, of course it would. | ||
| I have been honest enough to say, if the anti-religious left, and the left is anti-religious, from Lenin to Soros, if the left had produced kind, intelligent, wise people, my religious beliefs would have been challenged. | ||
| I fully acknowledge it. | ||
| Because I judge ideologies by their product. | ||
| And that's why I don't judge people's theology or philosophy, but the left is wrong on everything, | ||
| ruins everything, and most of them aren't nice. | ||
| I'm not talking liberals, you know I make a distinction. | ||
| Liberals are weak, but they're not bad. | ||
| You know it's interesting because as you know we just had Justin a couple weeks ago and | ||
| we've got number two, baby number two on the way. | ||
| But we did the bris at eight days. | ||
| And, you know, if you look at it from a purely secular point of view, it's somewhat of a crazy thing to do. | ||
| You bring this perfect thing into the world and then you're cutting this child. | ||
| That's what you're doing. | ||
| And I remember David and I had this talk before about, you know, our thoughts on everything. | ||
| And my overriding feeling about it was that my parents did it, their parents did it, their parents' parents did it, and way beyond that, for something like 5,783 years. | ||
|
unidentified
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3,000. | |
| Well, really, 3,200. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Or 4,000, actually 4,000 if you go back to Abraham. | ||
| Right, the calendar, but we go back to Abraham, okay. | ||
| But the point is that it's been done for a long, long time. | ||
| And I felt that that, am I just wiser than everyone that came before me? | ||
| Oh, God bless you. | ||
| Oh, that's so the perfect reaction. | ||
| And that's what they believe. | ||
| They think they are. | ||
| Leftists believe they are the best people who ever lived. | ||
| They do! | ||
| That's why they tear down Lincoln and Washington. | ||
| We are better than them. | ||
| They don't hold a candle to these people. | ||
| By the way, I just want you to know, I have two sons, as you'll have, God willing, and I don't cry easily. | ||
| And the two times I most remember sobbing was at their bris, at their circumcision, exactly for what you said. | ||
| Holy crow! | ||
| This goes back 4,000 years. | ||
| I'm not prepared to end it. | ||
| It just felt crazy to me. | ||
| Like, no, I just know so much. | ||
| I just know so much. | ||
| I won't do this thing. | ||
| The people before me were so dumb. | ||
| It's almost grotesque in a bizarre sense to think that way. | ||
| But do you think that that, so you're writing this book as all of this COVID craziness is going down, and you're making this distinction between, you know, politics and having a religious worldview or just something that's not politics. | ||
| And then you see the people in the name of science sort of become, I wouldn't say religious, they became cult-like in their following of this stuff. | ||
| That must have been interesting to be writing this at the same time. | ||
| All it did is reinforce everything I was writing and everything. | ||
| Do you know that there's another law in the Torah? | ||
| To give you an idea of how contemporaneous this stuff is, do not follow the majority To do bad. | ||
| Could've put that one on Twitter, Dennis. | ||
| Is that mind-blowing? | ||
| A biblical law! | ||
| Do you think somehow that religious people didn't sell this stuff well enough? | ||
| Like, what do you think happened here? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| You're right, that you hit it. | ||
| Dave, you're so in touch with everything, it cracks me up. | ||
| Talking to you is such a joy. | ||
| Likewise, my friend. | ||
| That is, thank you, that is exactly correct. | ||
| The religious are as responsible for the rampant non-religiosity as the anti-religious are. | ||
| That is exactly correct. | ||
| Do you think that goes across religions, from a western sense at least? | ||
| Oh, completely. | ||
| Christians fail to teach religion properly. | ||
| Jews fail to teach religion properly. | ||
| They all relied on I'm religious, my kid will be religious. | ||
| End of issue. | ||
| By the way, Americans did it as Americans. | ||
| Americans didn't sell America to their kids. | ||
| And that's another law in Deuteronomy. | ||
| You have to teach these things diligently to your children when you wake up, when you go to bed, when you walk by the way. | ||
| These are all, it's so brilliant. | ||
| You can't stop, and it's perfect to tell you because you're going to have You have one and a half, or one and three quarters. | ||
| Dave, you guys gotta talk to your kids about values constantly. | ||
| I know I drove my kids crazy. | ||
| I have one message. | ||
| I don't give a damn about your grades. | ||
| All I care about is your character. | ||
| Have a great day. | ||
| And your kids are pretty good. | ||
| I know David particularly. | ||
| Yes, that's correct. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| And they play that recording. | ||
| By the way, my older son, whom you know better, also David. | ||
| The one straight David at the table. | ||
| You love that. | ||
| You love when it's the five of us. | ||
| There's one straight David. | ||
| I gotta say that it does, he cracks me up in general, David. | ||
| But he has one complaint against me. | ||
| You're gonna love this. | ||
| Because if you don't have a complaint against your father, you're not normal. | ||
| So he has one complaint that I know of, okay? | ||
| I can't speak about others that I don't know of. | ||
| Dad, you didn't push me hard enough in school. | ||
| And he's right. | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| In fact, I said, I don't care if you do your homework. | ||
| I care about your character. | ||
| Very few parents say that, but I'll tell you something, you get better character. | ||
| All right, Dennis, now I'm going to ask you the hardest question I can ask you, because you gave me the perfect segue, which is the thing that my mom often says to me. | ||
| She says, I know you've become good friends with Dennis Prager, and, you know, I agree with Dennis Prager on a lot of things, but he always talks about character, how important character is, but he voted for Donald Trump. | ||
| He supports Donald Trump. | ||
| Talk to my mother, Dennis. | ||
| I have an answer to your mother. | ||
| Mom, God forbid you or a loved one has cancer. | ||
| I got two oncologists for you. | ||
| One with great character, one with a compromised character, but who treats cancer better. | ||
| Which would you go to? | ||
| You don't choose everybody on character. | ||
| You choose a leader on what he will do or she will do, as the case may be, for your country. | ||
| Whether they are kind or monogamous or whatever, that is between them and their spouse and God. | ||
| Between me and them, John F. Kennedy had orgies in the White House. | ||
| In my opinion, incidentally, this is truly incidentally, I believe that Joe Biden's character is so much more deficient than Donald Trump, they won't even end up in the same place in the hereafter. | ||
| They won't be neighbors. | ||
| Nevertheless, it doesn't matter to me. | ||
| I don't vote for president based on what I perceive as their character. | ||
| America is more important to me than whether Donald Trump slept with a porn star. | ||
| That is of no interest to me whatsoever. | ||
| It's of interest to me if my son does it, but I'm not voting for him for president. | ||
| Was that a hard one for you to sell a couple years back for your audience that's known you for so long? | ||
| And talking about this sort of thing? | ||
| Hey, listen, I wrote a piece called Adultery and Politicians 25 years ago. | ||
| It's in print in my book of essays from 1998 called Think a Second Time. | ||
| Adultery and Politicians. | ||
| I don't give a damn if a politician was faithful or not to his wife. | ||
| So you've been pretty consistent on this. | ||
| I've been very consistent, that's right. | ||
| The only thing I didn't know since high school, I don't mean I haven't, I've learned a ton, but the only big thing I didn't realize until Ronald Reagan, that's when I became a Republican, the truth of his great one sentence, the government is not the solution, it's the problem. | ||
| That is what, in one sentence, people say, how can you get so much done in five minutes in a PragerU video? | ||
| It doesn't take five minutes. | ||
| A truth can take one sentence. | ||
| Government is the problem, not the solution. | ||
| He was entirely right. | ||
| I learned that. | ||
| Wasn't Reagan also the worst eight words you can hear in the English language? | ||
| I'm from the government and I'm here to help, right? | ||
| That was pretty good. | ||
| Speaking of PragerU real quick, little sidebar, you guys are about to put up your 500th five-minute video. | ||
| I've done four of those. | ||
| Would you say they're the four best? | ||
| Oh, there's no close third. | ||
| I mean, it's pretty amazing what you built, you know, you and Alan. | ||
| You just had, or he, I guess, had the original idea, sort of. | ||
| I've heard you talk about it a little bit. | ||
| He had the original idea. | ||
| In the Indian Ocean, I might add. | ||
| And you put this thing together, and now every day the New York Times is running hit pieces on you. | ||
| Well, you know my favorite? | ||
| You will love this. | ||
| I don't know if you know this. | ||
| Front page New York Times last month, an attack on, who was it? | ||
| Oh, on Elon Musk. | ||
| And on the front page it said, he must be watching PragerU videos. | ||
|
unidentified
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I loved it. | |
| You don't know how much fundraising we did on that one line. | ||
| Yeah, I bet. | ||
| I bet. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| 500 videos, it's pretty impressive. | ||
| But wait, I want to circle back. | ||
| So do you want to go into some of the other of the seven? | ||
| I was going to jump to some other things, but I feel like you can basically introduce yourself here. | ||
| I just want to make something clear to your viewers. | ||
| The most important thing in life is wisdom, good intentions, Don't mean crap. | ||
| They mean nothing. | ||
| The amount of evil done by people with good intentions is greater than the amount of evil done by sadists. | ||
| So if you think you're good because you have good intentions, join the list of people who haven't done any good. | ||
| You need wisdom to make a better world and to make a better character for yourself. | ||
| These five books are wisdom about every aspect of life. | ||
| I am I am so in love with the Torah, the first five books, and thank God I know them in Hebrew, because obviously I don't think I could have done this without knowing the Hebrew. | ||
| I am so in love with it that you'll find this, you who are making your way gradually to a less secular life, you'll find this of interest, and I say this now a lot in speeches. | ||
| I don't believe in the Torah because I believe in God. | ||
| I believe in God because I believe in the Torah. | ||
| My vehicle to belief in God is rational. | ||
| That's why my series is called The Rational Bible. | ||
| This is the third of five of those books. | ||
| My vehicle to God is not miracles, is not visions, is not emotion. | ||
| It is, and I'm not saying everyone's vehicle, but mine is reason. | ||
| The Torah is my rational vehicle to God. | ||
| And I make that case in each of these volumes. | ||
| So I gave you an example of those two laws. | ||
| Here's another one, let's see. | ||
| Oh God, you shall, okay. | ||
| The Ten Commandments is repeated in Deuteronomy. | ||
| God says it in Exodus, and Moses repeats it in Deuteronomy. | ||
| And Deuteronomy means in Greek, second law. | ||
| So this is Moses reviewing everything. | ||
| So, one of them is, of course, you shall now have no other gods. | ||
| And I point out in both Exodus and Deuteronomy, we have more gods today than any ancient pagan had. | ||
| When you think of the false gods that people believe in today, and I go through them, and it's like, just one example, science. | ||
| I believe in science. | ||
| And I go, what the hell does that mean? | ||
| Does science tell you to be kind? | ||
| Does science tell you to be honest? | ||
| Does science tell you to marry? | ||
| Does science tell you to have children? | ||
| Does science tell you to be courageous? | ||
| Science tells you nothing! | ||
| It tells you science! | ||
| You can also ask the science people. | ||
| They believe in science. | ||
| Then ask them if boys can become girls and they get quiet real quick. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| This was science. | ||
| It was science not to have kids in school. | ||
| Sweden had kids in school every single day. | ||
| Not one died. | ||
| That wasn't science. | ||
| That was scared scientists who are worthless and harmful. | ||
| So do you connect that? | ||
| There's a big difference between scientists and scientists. | ||
| So do you connect that to what we talked about earlier? | ||
| That in a weird way, people need to believe whether they believe that or not. | ||
| So that whether they think they have to or not, they end up believing in something. | ||
| Thus, the secularists just, or the progressives, whatever you want to call them, they just pick the different set of beliefs, period. | ||
| That is exactly, yes, exactly, you know, Mother Earth. | ||
| I don't believe in Mother Earth. | ||
| But I believe the Earth was created by God for humans to use. | ||
| Not abuse, but use. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Humans are more important than trees, more important than apes. | ||
| That is my human-centered, divinely given belief. | ||
| That's just another example. | ||
| So, which do you believe? | ||
| Are the humans a curse on Earth? | ||
| Or are the humans too To control Earth for the good of the human species. | ||
| I believe the latter. | ||
| Yes, go on. | ||
| Do you sense that over the last couple years because of the COVID craziness and the way our politics has become, you know, cult-like or whatever, that people are waking up to something more rational or maybe they're not saying, okay, I'm ready to make that leap of faith. | ||
| You had a certain set of people, but that there is something happening. | ||
| You know, it's like, if you're going to tell people that they're sons or their daughters, they might go, you know, maybe some of that old stuff in the Torah or some of those other old books is pretty good. | ||
| If they're exposed to it, which is my dream, 4,000 reviews. | ||
| By the way, when Exodus came out, it was the number two book on Amazon, which is astonishing for a Bible commentary. | ||
| Why did you write them in a different order? | ||
| I'll be totally honest, I wrote them in the order that I thought would appeal to people to get them involved. | ||
| If I started with Deuteronomy, nobody would know what the hell I was doing. | ||
| But everybody heard of Exodus, and everybody heard of Genesis. | ||
| So I started with the two most widely known books, and I'm working my way through... I mean, when I get to Leviticus, if you ask the average... I believe this, truly. | ||
| If you went on Harvard campus and said to a kid, You know what Leviticus is? | ||
| You would probably say no. | ||
| Well, Leviticus is the favorite horse in the Kentucky Derby. | ||
| They go, no kidding! | ||
| They love Leviticus. | ||
| You know, they'll... Leviticus! | ||
| Oh man, Leviticus fan club! | ||
| Who won the Triple Crown! | ||
| Wait, I want to back up to, as I've jotted down a couple notes here, I usually don't have to jot down notes for an interview, much less with a friend, but there's so much going on here that I actually did write a few things down. | ||
| And you obviously, you do this all the time on your radio show and everywhere else, you talk about goodness so much. | ||
| And you connect that, really, to the Torah, that it's not just knowledge or wisdom, as you would put it, but goodness is also baked in there. | ||
| And it doesn't seem like we have a lot of that right now. | ||
| So my underlying belief, and that of the Torah, is that God wants people to be good. | ||
| That is why, and it's one of the reasons that I am in love with the Torah, it makes clear you don't have to be a Jew for God to reward you. | ||
| You can be a pagan, you can be, obviously they didn't exist then, but later a Christian, you can be anything. | ||
| God judges your behavior, not your theology. | ||
| And that is one of the greatest lessons. | ||
| It's called ethical monotheism. | ||
| It is my fundamental belief. | ||
| If one wants to become a Jew, one is more than welcome. | ||
| But the Jewish belief is not that you have to be a Jew to be saved. | ||
| You have to be a good person. | ||
| Nobody is perfect. | ||
| I said good, not perfect. | ||
| God made us flawed, and so we have to do the best we can. | ||
| You want to do the best you can, you have to learn wisdom. | ||
| You can't be a good person if you're a fool. | ||
| That's the basic, fundamental understanding. | ||
| And in order to gain wisdom, you have to study wisdom. | ||
| That's why I wrote a column a few weeks ago. | ||
| I had more wisdom, and so did all the kids in my class at Yeshiva, than 90% of today's college professors. | ||
| Again, when I was 15. | ||
| I had more wisdom, and so did my other yeshiva classmates, and so did Christian kids in traditional Christian schools, than 90% of the professors in America today. | ||
| We studied wisdom. | ||
| We understood, for example, we knew that people's nature is not basically good. | ||
| And the average professor probably thinks human nature is basically good, which is the beginning of foolishness. | ||
| You can't have a coherent worldview if you think human nature is essentially good. | ||
| Is that also why politics is so screwy? | ||
| That we have a bunch of people who just want to take advantage of people who are not wise? | ||
| I mean, if you just turn on almost anything, it's like, man, you'd have to be pretty unwise to be buying any of this nonsense from mainstream media these days. | ||
| Yeah, but the point is, it's the unwise leading the unwise. | ||
| It's not like they're wise and they're fooling the unwise. | ||
| Is Gavin Newsom a wise man? | ||
| My audience knows my feelings. | ||
| Is Lori Lightfoot a wise woman? | ||
| But wisdom isn't valued, it isn't taught. | ||
| That's why these books that I'm writing I think are so incredibly important. | ||
| Look, nobody writes a Bible commentary to get rich. | ||
| I'm writing it because this is my legacy. | ||
| Of my life's work. | ||
| People need to understand the greatest five books ever written. | ||
| And that's what this project is, called The Rational Bible. | ||
| I should mention that, actually, last time I saw you was just a couple weeks ago with Jordan Peterson, and you were in town because you were doing, correct me if I'm wrong, his biblical series. | ||
| That's right, Exodus. | ||
| Oh, so you went through Exodus with him. | ||
| Yeah, and we only got through half, and we're going to do the other half. | ||
| By the way, you'll get a kick out of this. | ||
| So he invited five of us, five or six of us, with The Daily Wire. | ||
| It's a beautiful project. | ||
| And I was delighted to be part of it. | ||
| He wrote to me something to the effect, I'm really glad you were there. | ||
| We needed somebody to make us laugh. | ||
| I realized, I realized. | ||
| He meant Jew. | ||
| I think he meant Jew. | ||
| I don't know if I should even admit. | ||
| I think he meant Jew. | ||
| What? | ||
| That's what the Jews are supposed to do. | ||
| Yeah, I guess so. | ||
| It was very fun. | ||
| I realized within the first hour, uh-oh, if I don't start saying some really silly things, we're doomed. | ||
| When you have these talks, so I met, I wasn't with you guys that night, but I was with that whole crew, the biblical crew, a night or two later. | ||
| When you're with all these people, and I think you were the only one coming at it from a Jewish perspective, but then there were obviously Christians and Catholics and all sorts of other things. | ||
| Do you find that there are really places of divergence that can't be sort of accommodated or that you can't walk away and all be kind of okay? | ||
| It all depends on the Christian I'm with. | ||
| I mean, for example, Oz Guinness, whom I fell in love with, he was one of the others. | ||
| He has written about 30 books, which is three times more than I've written. | ||
| He, for all intents and purposes, he was like a fellow Jew in terms of thought and theology. | ||
| Of course he believes in Christ, he's a Christian. | ||
| But otherwise, he was my ally on every point, and most of them would be. | ||
| There is much greater difference between a conservative and a left-wing Jew than between a conservative Jew and a conservative Christian, or a liberal Jew and a liberal Christian. | ||
| The divergence today is right-left, not Christian-Jew. | ||
| Yeah, and that divergence doesn't seem to be going anywhere from the political scene. | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, no, it's not just political. | ||
| Social, philosophical, moral, we have nothing in common. | ||
| Left and right have nothing in common. | ||
| I say this with sadness, but I live in the real world. | ||
| So how do we get out of that? | ||
| How do we get out of that? | ||
| The only way to get out of it is... well, it's not the only way. | ||
| The best way, or one of the key ways, is disseminate what we stand for. | ||
| Which is why there's PragerU, which is why I'm writing the Rational Bible, which is why you do what you do. | ||
| That is why, by the way, they try to shut us down. | ||
| They know we can undo. | ||
| Why is it a big deal if you go to a college campus, or I do, or Ben Shapiro, or Jordan Peterson, or Candace Owens? | ||
| Why do they give a damn? | ||
| They have four years to indoctrinate, we get 90 minutes. | ||
| Because they know in their heart we can undo four years in 90 minutes. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| Sometimes we can undo four years in five minutes. | ||
| That's even better. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Hence the PragerU videos. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's even better. | ||
| Let's dive into a couple of the other pieces here. | ||
| Chapter 13 is Why Would God Test Us? | ||
| This is obviously one that you've been asked in a million forums on every probably radio show you've ever done. | ||
| Shouldn't things just be a little bit easier? | ||
| Come on, there's God, He's moral, we're trying to be good. | ||
| Couldn't He just take it easy on us just a little bit? | ||
| Why do bad things happen to good people, Dennis? | ||
| Well, those are two separate questions. | ||
| Bad things happening to good people and testing us. | ||
| I don't regard all suffering as a divine test because it would imply that if your kid has cancer, God gave your kid cancer. | ||
| I don't believe that for a second. | ||
| God created a world where bad things can happen. | ||
| And my best answer to this question, which I've been absorbed with all of my life since high school, I heard a statement from a rabbi, Milton Steinberg, and I think he said it, I didn't hear it from him directly, I read it. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| He said the following. | ||
| The believer in God has to explain one thing. | ||
| The existence of unjust suffering. | ||
| The atheist has to explain the existence of everything else. | ||
| I find that the best answer I've ever heard to this problem. | ||
| I don't deny it's a problem, unjust suffering. | ||
| I don't deny it. | ||
| But compared to what the atheist has to explain, literally everything else, and for which he has no explanation, then I'm back to belief in God with my question. | ||
| Dennis, they say we're in a multiverse. | ||
| That's what they always say. | ||
| We're in a multiverse. | ||
| Anything's possible. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| The only thing that's not possible is a multiverse. | ||
| That must be what believing in one God is all about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It just kind of keeps you off the multiverse. | |
| Listen, just remember this. | ||
| And this should be a message even to people like you. | ||
| And it is, I know, because you're now thinking that maybe religion has something important to say. | ||
| There were very few outliers during the COVID hysteria. | ||
| And almost all of them were religious, Christian or Jew. | ||
| That's not insignificant. | ||
| If a place was going to be open, and most, by the way, most synagogues and churches, I think, failed the test terribly. | ||
| They succumbed to secular irrational authority, just like everybody else. | ||
| But those institutions that didn't were almost all religious. | ||
| It's like who rescued Jews in the Holocaust. | ||
| Very few people. | ||
| But among them, overwhelmingly, they were religious people. | ||
| Most religious people failed the test. | ||
| But of those who passed the test, most were religious. | ||
| That's basically as high of credit as you can give to religion, I suppose, when it kicks ball. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| Not every religious person is terrific, but most terrific people are religious. | ||
| Chapter 34. | ||
| I thought this was really interesting in light of politics and something we kind of discussed earlier. | ||
| People in positions of authority should not seek to be loved. | ||
| This is on page 508, it's a hefty book. | ||
| It seems like almost everybody in politics is there to be loved. | ||
| They do seem to love the limelight. | ||
| I would say not all. | ||
| I would say we have an exception here in Florida of a guy that's trying to just do the good job that he's put in for. | ||
| That's right, doesn't care if he's loved. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But most of them, no. | ||
| So let me, this is, I'm so happy you picked on that. | ||
| The single greatest crisis has been the parental authority crisis since World War II. | ||
| Parents decided that the thing they wanted most was that their kids loved them. | ||
| And that ended parenthood and ended our society's growth as a moral society, building good people. | ||
| The moment the parent wants to be loved, that is the end of their parenting. | ||
| The moment a political leader wishes to be loved, that is the end of their validity as a political leader. | ||
| The moment the teacher wants to be loved, that is the end of their teaching ability. | ||
| The only people we should want to be loved from are our spouses and friends. | ||
| End of issue. | ||
| Um, well, I know somebody is watching this thinking, but wait a minute, Dennis, I can accept what you said on Trump related to the, uh, you know, whether he had sex with other women or whatever, but he does seem like he wants to be loved. | ||
| Trump? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If there's one thing, even his enemies have to, he loves to be loved by his followers, but, uh, as a general rule, Trump has disdain. | ||
| Oh, that's interesting. | ||
| So you're making a distinction between sort of someone who has, let's say followers or supporters that love them versus he's not going for institutional love or something. | ||
| I mean, that's kind of whittling it down. | ||
| Yes, or exactly. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I mean, Trump, Trump, you could say Trump loves Trump, but that Trump does what he does for love Given the swiftness with which he will lash out at people, he's the last person I would accuse of doing what he does for love. | ||
| I got it. | ||
| I got it. | ||
| But love comes along the way when you do this, isn't that something? | ||
| When you do something that's good and honest and true, you get a lot of love. | ||
| I mean, I've been out and about with you. | ||
| Well, that is right. | ||
| That's the irony, isn't it? | ||
| If you act Nobly, and not in pursuit of love, you will end up with a lot of love. | ||
| So, you know, one of the most common things people say to me at airports and restaurants, they say, oh, you know, I just want you to know I love you, but eh, I'm sure you hear it all the time. | ||
| So I go, well, I hear it all the time, but on the other hand, I'd like you to just Google Dennis Prager, asshole, and see how many hits you get. | ||
| There's worse things you could Google about either one of us, I'm sure. | ||
| You know, that actually- That is correct. | ||
| That actually reminds me of something that, I hope you don't mind me bringing this up, when Jordan and I and you had dinner a couple weeks ago, and I was fortunate enough, I don't know how many people would trade almost everything they got to right before they're about to be a father to sit down with Dennis Prager and Jordan Peterson. | ||
| And one interesting thing that we noticed between the three of us is that, if you don't mind me saying, you are 74 years old, Jordan is 60 and I'm 46, so we have 14 years between the three of us, which was just sort of... | ||
| Yeah, it was just sort of interesting to think about. | ||
| But you said something when we were talking about how to parent and teach the children the right thing and all this. | ||
| You said something to the effect of how that whatever your parents' faults were, whatever you might look back and fault them for, that you said, but I turned out to be a good moral person, so I can let all of those things go. | ||
| I'm roughly paraphrasing you. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But I thought it was a really decent way of Moving forward in life, because everyone's got issues with their parents, but a lot of people are just focused on them all day long. | ||
| Which is why, by the way, another brilliance of the Torah, we're instructed to honor our parents, but not to love them. | ||
| And we are told to love the stranger, to love God, to love our neighbor, but we're not told to love our parents. | ||
| It realizes in its genius that cannot be demanded of people. | ||
| It can be demanded of people that they not dishonor their parents. | ||
| This is why I'm, I tell you, this is reason number 8566 why I'm in love with the Torah. | ||
| How do you square that with people who just have, you know, just generally terrible parents? | ||
| I mean, alcoholic, abusive, neglectful, etc, etc. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So, I spoke about that on my Rosh Hashanah service. | ||
| As a general rule, exceptions, there's a rule in law, what is it? | ||
| Bad cases make bad law. | ||
| Nothing can cover every instance. | ||
| Do we all acknowledge that we should stop at red lights? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| How about if the guy next to you in the car, your passenger has a heart attack, and it's a matter of time that you have to get him to a hospital. | ||
| Will you go through a red light if you can? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Will everybody justify it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So we all understand there are exceptions to rules, but it takes a lot, and you just have to answer to God for this, it takes a lot to justify not honoring a parent. | ||
| And I'll give an example. | ||
| You are not justified if your parent voted for Trump and you hate Trump. | ||
| You're a scumbag if you don't talk to your father or mother because they voted for Trump. | ||
| You're just a lousy, damn, narcissistic kid, unworthy of anything positive to be said about you. | ||
| And I would say that to a conservative kid who didn't vote for a parent who voted for Biden. | ||
| But there doesn't exist such a kid. | ||
| Because if we conservatives met a guy, oh, I don't talk to my father, he voted for Biden, we'd say, what are you, an a-hole? | ||
| What the hell does that have to do? | ||
| He's your father, you schmuck. | ||
| I do think about that a lot, where it's like, you know, I had a chat with Bill Maher on his podcast, a two-hour chat, and I wanted to bring up what happened with you and him from a couple months back on his show, where you basically said, you know, Google men menstruating, and he kind of brushed it off, but it's true now, that is sort of a main point of the left, that now men can menstruate. | ||
| Okay, unfortunately it didn't come up. | ||
| But, I had a chat with him, and one of the things that we were sort of dancing around, that I was trying to explain to him in some ways, was that if someone that's conservative-leaning walks into a room full of liberals, you're going to be berated, or ignored, or treated horribly, or sneered at, or something. | ||
| If a liberal, or a lefty, whatever you want to call it at this point, walks into a room of conservatives, mostly they'll be super friendly, and then maybe they'll turn around and be like, boy, that guy's an idiot. | ||
| But it'll sort of be like, it'll be like sort of a joke. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| My whole life is an example of that. | ||
| That is exactly. | ||
| No, no, what is an example of that? | ||
| Well, my life in a way that I was in both those circles. | ||
| I know how they both operate. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And when you meet, if you're hanging out, you're up in beers or whatever, you're up in drinks, whatever, smoking cigars as you would with a bunch of conservatives and a liberal walks in, everyone's curious about why they think that way. | ||
| But the other way, it's like, why are you a Nazi? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I have nothing to add to it that is exactly correct. | ||
| It turns out we're nicer than they are. | ||
| That's the irony. | ||
| But I thought we're so scary, Dennis. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Well, we're scary to them for some reason. | ||
| You know who gave the reason in part? | ||
| The new Prime Minister of Italy. | ||
| Wasn't that incredible? | ||
| What a speech. | ||
| Those two minutes summarized everything. | ||
| I will just say, I wrote this 20 years ago. | ||
| But it doesn't matter. | ||
| To hear it from an Italian Prime Minister brings me such joy. | ||
| When she said, they hate the fact that we have an identity. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I am a woman. | ||
| I am a Christian. | ||
| I am an Italian. | ||
| And I am a mother. | ||
| It was so great. | ||
| I said this about George Soros a long time ago. | ||
| George Soros has no identity. | ||
| He has no national identity, and he has no religious identity. | ||
| And the people with no identity hate the people who have one. | ||
| And that really almost sums up, you said every, you know, it's left versus right, but really that almost is it. | ||
| It's the people of the Borg, of the collective identity, versus the people who, it's a little messy, because you're not going to believe this, they're going to think about things a little bit differently. | ||
| Are you hopeful, Dennis? | ||
| Are you hopeful for the country and for the world? | ||
| Because when I hang with you, you're laughing. | ||
| You laugh more than anyone I know. | ||
| You've got such a boisterous laugh. | ||
| You're always having a great time. | ||
| I see you with, when fans come up to you, I mean, you're always having a ball. | ||
| But this is, you know, it's not guaranteed that this thing's gonna get us to the other side and people are gonna be better and think better and be more wise. | ||
| So, I have figured out how to have a ball as the building falls down. | ||
| I'm not saying it will fall down, but there are massive cracks in the edifice. | ||
| I am not philosophically an optimist. | ||
| I don't know how any Jew could be, given the amount of suffering, given the fact that the most advanced society culturally in the world, Germany, the place of Beethoven and Bach and Schiller and Goethe, produces Auschwitz, nobody expected it. | ||
| Nobody expected it. | ||
| So I'm not a big optimist, but I don't give a damn about optimism or pessimism. | ||
| I only give a damn about what do I have to do. | ||
| And if they died on Normandy Beach at 20 years of age for liberty in America, I could live for liberty America. | ||
| And that's what I do. | ||
| And in the meantime, I have a great time. | ||
| I love being at your house. | ||
| Well, speaking of being at my house, we can end with this then. | ||
| When I left California, you were at my table for the last meal, the last supper in California when I begged you and Larry Elder and a couple people to come. | ||
| I had you on my show a couple months ago. | ||
| I reiterated the point. | ||
| I had you for dinner here a couple weeks ago. | ||
| Sue was here. | ||
| People have been here. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| What are you doing at this point? | ||
| It's insulting. | ||
| I tell everybody, Dave Rubin sends my wife and me, every damn week, another great house on sale in his neighborhood. | ||
| I'm on Zillow half the day just sending... Let me just tell you, it does have an effect. | ||
| We're not moving yet, but I need to tell you, we scour that house. | ||
| We read everything about it. | ||
| Dennis, all I'm saying, all I'm saying is, the house across the street from me, for sale, direct. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Imagine, you could wake up in the morning, cup of coffee, I come over, we chat about philosophy. | ||
| There's a tennis court, Dennis, a tennis court! | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| I know. | ||
| The problem, as you know, is the number of people I love who are here, including, I founded a synagogue here, which is very meaningful to me every Sabbath. | ||
| And then I do my High Holy Days. | ||
| So, it's a tear. | ||
| I totally get why you moved. | ||
| I totally get it. | ||
| Dennis, I... Anyway, I really hope your people will get the Rational Bible, the new volume. | ||
| I promise them it'll change their life. | ||
| I promise. | ||
| It's very powerful stuff. | ||
| Well, look, you've changed my life, personally and professionally. | ||
| I mentioned to you at my Passover Seder this past year, we had the rational Haggadah, where you can go through the story of Passover and get wisdom, not only from you, but Jordan Peterson and some other people in our circles. | ||
| I found it, it's a little more, I would say, edible than maybe the old Maxwell House Haggadah. | ||
| It's starting to age on me a little, you know? | ||
| Well, it's certainly richer. | ||
| There's a coffee joke there somewhere. | ||
| Dennis, I love you. | ||
| I hope to see you soon. | ||
| It's mutual, same here. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about spirituality instead of nonstop yelling, check out our spirituality playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're all right over here. |
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