Feb. 19, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:05:14
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| My question for you is this. | ||
| Being here in Florida, taking this entire conversation that we've had, the beautiful weather, the freedom, | ||
| a system that's working, flourishing, getting rid of all the things that you're frustrated with, | ||
| right, could a good liberal like you vote for a guy like Ron DeSantis? | ||
| All right. We are at the newly revamped local studio. | ||
| Look at that warm wood in the background. | ||
| We heard your calls. | ||
| Warm it up, guys. | ||
| And we did. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| The brand new local studio. | ||
| The brand new, brand new local studio. | ||
| I'm still old-fashioned Dave Rubin, and I am joined today by my friend, philosopher, author, can I still call you? | ||
| You're a teacher of some sort. | ||
| Teacher, friend, and friend of the show. | ||
| And friend of the show. | ||
| That's what you said when you sat down, more importantly than anything else. | ||
| Well, no, it's actually not more importantly. | ||
| Our friendship is the most important thing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| It's nice to be a friend of the show. | ||
| Well, it is good to see you, my friend. | ||
| Pete Pagosian, obviously. | ||
| You have not been on the show since February, we just checked this, February of 2019. | ||
| So quite literally four years ago this month. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| It's been a while. | ||
| A lot to catch up on. | ||
| A lot to catch up on. | ||
| We booked this thing a couple weeks ago. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And then last night was the State of the Union address. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So let's start with that. | ||
| Let's just start with that, because something interesting happened, and I referenced it on my show this morning, on my wrap-up show, that what I see happening in America that I think is one of the most disturbing trends is that we're all watching the same script, we're all watching the same movie, and we are experiencing wildly different things. | ||
| We are seeing completely different things, our reactions are completely different. | ||
| Anyway, I'm watching that thing. | ||
| Thinking this guy's a liar, a fraud, he's obviously drugged, these people are bringing in all of the wrong policies, it's a miracle he hasn't fallen off the stage and knocked the podium over, I mean all of the stuff. | ||
| And then I'm looking at your Twitter. | ||
| And you're seemingly impressed by what's going on. | ||
| You seem to like him. | ||
| You seem to think that it's put to bed some of the questions about his mental acumen, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| His dementia. | ||
| And then I thought, man, I cannot wait to sit with Pete tomorrow because we're friends and it does not matter if we disagree on this stuff, but how we could view this so differently. | ||
| And so the other context of that is you're texting me like, are you drunk tweeting? | ||
| Yeah, well, I thought you must be drunk or you were hacked into because you're going, Biden seems sharp. | ||
| This all makes sense. | ||
| So I guess the more profound point is that we can disagree about our perception. | ||
| We're going to talk about what we perceive, but we're still buddies. | ||
| I'm still sitting here. | ||
| We're going to hang out like that. | ||
| There's a context for our disagreement. | ||
| So this is what I thought. | ||
| Independent of the content, the narrative that Biden is senile or he has dementia, I think that speech, to me, it completely put that to rest. | ||
| He was sharp. | ||
| He was focused. | ||
| And I understand he has a teleprompter. | ||
| I understand he has notes in front of him. | ||
| A senile person or a person with dementia, I don't care if he's on Monafidil or Provigil, whatever drug he is on, I don't think he could have delivered that performance. | ||
| And I'm talking independent of content. | ||
| Okay, so let's put content aside. | ||
| Yeah, and we can talk about that content. | ||
| Sure, so we'll do the content and the policy thing after. | ||
| But putting that aside, so you're just talking about his physical and mental ability to walk up on that stage and read that prompter. | ||
| You think that, look, I can't diagnose him. | ||
| For sure he has dementia or Alzheimer's or something but to me he clearly clearly has something wrong with him and that the fact that they can prop him up either through Adderall or a ton of coffee or God knows what they have whatever those drugs are I don't know how do you view that and go well because he had a decently cogent two hours that overrides all of the other video of the stammering and confusion Okay, two things. | ||
| Okay, two things. | ||
| Let's take one step back. | ||
| The thing that changed my mind about Donald Trump was in Trump's second debate with Biden, he clearly destroyed him. | ||
| In fact, sometimes I think Megyn Kelly and I are the same person. | ||
| She tweeted something like, it's all been an act. | ||
| Because up at that point, I almost never heard him make a coherent argument or sentence or statement. | ||
| Wait, when you're saying he destroyed him, you mean Biden destroyed Trump? | ||
| No, Trump destroyed in the second debate. | ||
| Oh, because there were only two, because they cancelled one. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| The first one was a catastrophe. | ||
| But then I thought, like, you can't go from nothing to that. | ||
| Like, you can't go from a rambling, incoherent ignoramus to that. | ||
| I mean, he was on. | ||
| I think any objective, independent inquirer would have looked at that debate and said, Trump. | ||
| So I think with Biden... | ||
| So this gets back to the question, how can two people look at it? | ||
| I think any independent person would look at that and say, he was on point. | ||
| It was a good talk. | ||
| He was clear. | ||
| He does not have senility. | ||
| He's not suffering from senility. | ||
| He's not dementia. | ||
| His points were well articulated. | ||
| He wasn't slurring. | ||
| And I realize that's a low bar. | ||
| He wasn't drooling. | ||
| He did slur some. | ||
| Okay, so some of the words weren't Articulate or enunciate it perfectly, but I walked away from that and I questioned a lot of the narratives. | ||
| I also think that there is a kind of unfairness no matter who's in office. | ||
| You know, when Biden pinned the, I don't know, gave blood or something on his granddaughter, people edited it to make it look like he was touching her breasts. | ||
| Or I think that there's a lot of just Hacks who, if they don't like the content, and we can talk about the content, that's fine, but I'm just talking about him standing up there and delivering that performance. | ||
| I don't understand how you could not look at that and say, drugs aside, say, he was on point. | ||
| That was a good talk. | ||
| He was clear. | ||
| He made arguments. | ||
| He remembered to the extent that he's on a teleprompter. | ||
| He was looking around. | ||
| He engaged people in real banter. | ||
| I thought it was a great talk. | ||
| Okay, so I'm going to... Content aside. | ||
| We're going to plow through this. | ||
| So first off, I would say that A, we don't know what the drug situation is, so I would | ||
| imagine, and I don't know enough about cognitive, the drugs that they prescribe for cognitive | ||
| decline or whatever, but it seems to me that you could basically take almost anyone probably, | ||
| unless they're at the real end of stage with this stuff, and make them cogent for two hours. | ||
| So that, I don't see how that puts it to bed. | ||
| If anything, it seems to me you're saying there probably are drugs out there that can | ||
| make you somewhat functional every now and again. | ||
| So that would be the question, to find somebody that's coming from a guy who has brought up | ||
| an ethical violation for hoax papers. | ||
|
unidentified
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And by the way, I would prefer that you're right in a way. | |
| He is still the pilot of the plane, right? | ||
| So whether I agree with the stuff or not, the guy is in charge of an awful lot. | ||
| But hoping that I'm right doesn't make it right. | ||
| You would have to find people who suffered from similar perceived cognitive ailments and give them whatever suite of drugs and see if they could perform. | ||
| I would highly doubt it. | ||
| Unless you want to say he's somehow like a trick pony, he's somehow—and even this | ||
| is territory I'm not particularly comfortable wading into—he's somehow performatively | ||
| giving a talk he has no idea what he's talking about. | ||
| But even then, it was pretty impressive. | ||
| I just thought it put to bed to rest the idea that here's a senile, demented guy. | ||
| Now, if you've watched the videos of Joe Biden from 20 years ago, I mean, he's clearly | ||
| a different man. | ||
| I mean, it's just—I'll give it to you. | ||
| A hundred percent. | ||
| But that talk, I thought he shined. | ||
| You know, it's interesting because I also spent—I had two grandmothers that both had | ||
| certain amount of dementia. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| My, my grandmother on my mom's side had it for longer and I, and I, and I really saw, and I spent a lot of time with her because I was doing standup at night. | ||
| So during the days I was with her often for days on end, hours and hours. | ||
| And I really saw that decline. | ||
| One of the things that I noticed that Biden seems to have, and I've seen a lot of people mention this also, is there's a dysregulation related to his emotional response. | ||
| Yeah, I can see that. | ||
| So at times he seems very slow and quiet, then he does that whispering thing, and then out of nowhere he starts yelling. | ||
| And you don't know why. | ||
| And that China thing where he's yelling, it's like there was no anger to be expressing there, but he has to emote in a very weird way because something back there is not right. | ||
| Again, I'm not a doctor. | ||
| It could be a performative thing too, though, right? | ||
| I mean, it could be like this is how you give a good speech. | ||
| But performative almost as if it's broken down and it's not performing correctly, right? | ||
| Well, it wouldn't be... | ||
| As if he wouldn't doing it correctly if he broke down and had random outbursts. | ||
| But if he has outbursts about the same thing. | ||
| But again, I don't even think that was an outburst. | ||
| I think he was trying to drill home something. | ||
| Maybe even to appease the Republicans. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The funny thing is neither one of us know what he was trying to drive home. | ||
| Related to the content part of it. | ||
| Okay, so putting that aside, because I don't want to spend three hours talking about his cognitive state, but I think the fact that we even don't really see that eye-to-eye is interesting, that you just feel it was enough evidence, as you said, to put it to bed, where to me it was like, that's not enough evidence to put to bed. | ||
| It's enough evidence to go, oh, I'm probably right about this thing, and we will probably find out that I'm right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, think about it. | ||
| If he makes it through the term, at some point when he's no longer president, Or if he's had to step down or something, it's all going to come out. | ||
| He's obviously on something. | ||
| So my main takeaway from that was different than yours, I think. | ||
| My main takeaway is that we are so divided, and I've lost very close friends of mine who have been in my house, you know, buddies of mine over political disputes. | ||
| Co-friends. | ||
| Co-friends. | ||
| So the fact that you and I can disagree on this and be completely cool, like that's the model. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like that's what everybody should be striving to end. | ||
| Look, dude, if you said, listen, my kids are sick. | ||
| I know you're in Florida for a few days. | ||
| David can't do it. | ||
| Can you help me out? | ||
| Dude, in one second, I'd be there. | ||
| Yeah, I know you would. | ||
| And does it matter to me if you think Biden is a driveling fool? | ||
| No. | ||
| It doesn't matter to me at all. | ||
| It's actually more interesting in a way because we're all going into our own echo chambers whether we like it or not. | ||
| It's becoming increasingly hard to do it. | ||
| So because I know you as a person and as a decent human being and all that, to watch last night and I'm watching you tweet and I'm like, this is wild. | ||
| But it really made me want to sit down. | ||
| So let's talk a little bit about the content of some of this stuff. | ||
| I don't think of you as a purely political beast, but you sort of became a political beast because of what was going on at Portland State and your stance on free speech. | ||
| So maybe for people that haven't seen our previous interviews or don't know too much of your bio, you want to maybe hit like a minute or two of that just so that it has a little context. | ||
| A little context to how you started talking about politics, I guess. | ||
| Yeah, so I experienced a woke takeover, or let's put it this way, I experienced an authoritarian takeover fueled by an ideology, not only for which there was absolutely no evidence, but for which the evidence was against. | ||
| Every time I started asking, not even questioning, but asking for evidence, The hammers came down, the investigation started. | ||
| So you were an assistant professor of... Philosophy. | ||
| Philosophy. | ||
| We did an event very early on in my career. | ||
| Right, with Christina Hoff Sommers. | ||
| You brought Christina Hoff Sommers and I to Portland State to do an event. | ||
| And remember the SWAT teams, the security guards, they were everywhere. | ||
| We had to go in the room and they were like shielding us. | ||
| us. | ||
| That was the first time, subsequently it's happened all the time now, but that was the | ||
| first time I had ever done an event where security was needed, where there were protesters | ||
| outside, people screaming, there were threats of violence, cops everywhere. | ||
| I remember we had to go to a separate green room where the cops then had to escort us | ||
| to the stage. | ||
|
unidentified
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All this crazy. | |
| And they had these huge shields that were like in case someone shot us or something. | ||
| Yeah, I remember that. | ||
| But the point is, you were an assistant professor of philosophy, a lefty, a liberal. | ||
| Right, liberal. | ||
| I was never a lefty. | ||
| Okay, so you were liberal in the classical sense of liberalism, but that was not good enough for a place like Portland State. | ||
| It was not good enough. | ||
| Not only was it not extreme enough, but it wasn't good enough because to question the orthodoxy means you're not just wrong, you're bad. | ||
| So, enough about that. | ||
| Did the hoax papers, etc. | ||
| Right, you wrote these hoax papers with James Lindsay that really caught fire, and basically the whole idea was to show how the peer-reviewed process is, in essence, complete nonsense. | ||
| It's ideologically corrupt, right? | ||
| We wrote the conceptual penis, which we joked about before, and everyone went crazy about it. | ||
| It was a hoax paper. | ||
| You guys didn't prove what you thought you did. | ||
| To prove it, you need to do A, B, C, D, E. We did A, B, C, D, E. Did anybody say, oh my gosh, you've done A, B, C, D, E? | ||
| I guess we were wrong. | ||
| No. | ||
| Instead, they say Boghossian's unethical for fooling all those journal editors to take deranged papers. | ||
| Because your point in doing it was to show how nonsensical so much of these studies are. | ||
| Studies that then they cover on CNN and then a politician refers to the study. | ||
| It informs public policy. | ||
| It's ideological corruption. | ||
| These are the musings of ideologues. | ||
| They discharge their moral impulses in journals. | ||
| We've got to clean this up. | ||
| Like, there's just no question. | ||
| But instead of saying, like, oh, geez, you know, maybe certain disciplines, we have problems, we need to be more rigorous. | ||
| No, it's attack the people saying that there's a problem. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, to relate that to the political part of this State of the Union and some of the stuff that we didn't see eye to eye on, which I think is, it's rich that we're doing this. | ||
| So my basic position is that virtually everything he said was either a lie or an intentional obfuscation of the truth. | ||
| Something like saying gas prices are going down. | ||
| That is technically true, but they're significantly higher than when he took office. | ||
| Or inflation is going down. | ||
| Technically true, significantly higher than when he took office. | ||
| We can get into some COVID stuff in a bunch else, but what would you say about that in general? | ||
| And by the way, I'm not just blaming this on Democrats, they all do it. | ||
| So let's say that you're right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let's say that 100% of everything you just articulated to me is correct. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wouldn't the best way to convey that to be have Sarah Huckabee gave the, wouldn't it be to just go through those points and say, Biden said this. | ||
| Here's the actual data. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| It doesn't have to be complicated. | ||
| That's precisely, by the way, what we did on my show today. | ||
| That is what we did on my daily show. | ||
| But that's what people do when they participate in a similar framework of rationality and | ||
| reality. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I didn't see that at all in her. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Did you watch her? | ||
| I did. | ||
| I did. | ||
| OK. | ||
|
unidentified
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So she's talking about Trump and narratives and the story. | |
| No, no. | ||
| You take, if you believe that Biden said, not you, but if one believes, the Republicans | ||
| in particular believe it, then in the retort to that speech, you just go by, you go by, | ||
| that was like a canned prepared speech. | ||
| Right, so you wanted something written on the fly, basically, which I agree. | ||
| I wanted something that said, this is what, he said this, this is just not true, and the American people need to know why it's not true. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Like, the American, he said he's going to trim the debt by two trillion dollars. | ||
| The whole thing about the police was completely insane. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I would much rather have preferred, forget what I would have preferred, if you want to talk about things that are true and participate in reality, then that follow-up talk, that, I can't remember, the rebuttal or what have you, that should have been data-driven and talked about where Biden was wrong and it did not. | ||
| And it was a terrible missed opportunity. | ||
| So I will say, and I said it on my show this morning, I thought her, the speech itself, I thought was quite good because I think she was dealing with the grand narratives. | ||
| I liked her line. | ||
| I liked her line on you're basically either for reality or for craziness, something to that effect. | ||
| But yes, she didn't go in, they clearly didn't write it on the fly, because then they could have done what I did on the show this morning and shown that. | ||
| Or Vivek Ramaswamy could have given a great talk, woe capital, I mean he could have done that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Let's just put that aside for a second, the rebuttal, because very few people actually watch the rebuttal. | ||
| In a case like this, someone like you who cares about truth, when you hear him say these things, if you're willing to grant me the leash that what I'm telling you right now is true, that gas prices, for example, when he came in were about $2.30, they went up to $5, now they're around $3.30, so they are higher than when he took office, and then he says they're coming down. | ||
| It's just a verbal trick. | ||
| Now, I have no doubt Trump did it. | ||
| I have no doubt Obama did and everybody else. | ||
| But I think something's happening now where the lies because of COVID are so everywhere in society and they have been so debunked in real time that people can't take it anymore. | ||
| Something feels different about the lies. | ||
| We can be lied to to a certain degree and I think we're crossing a threshold with the lies that is going to do something very dangerous. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| So what are you asking, then? | ||
| So what I'm asking you is, if you can grant me that what I just told you is true about gas prices and inflation, that it is true. | ||
| Inflation was here when he got into office, then it went here, now it is down a little. | ||
| Over 8%. | ||
| Right. | ||
| His argument is that it's down, but it's like, no, it's not down from when you took over, it's down from the peak of it over the summer. | ||
| Yeah, and the implication of that is it's causal. | ||
| Like, he caused it. | ||
| Like there's some policy position or the Fed or something. | ||
| Which is also dangerous that they think as political beings and as presidents that everything that happens is because of them, which is also nonsensical. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But what I'm asking you specifically is, in terms of the manipulation of truth that they're all constantly doing, what do you think we do with that? | ||
| Boy, that's a fantastic question. | ||
| You know, I think that's one way to bridge the liberal-conservative-Republican-Democrat divide, is just stop denying reality. | ||
| I mean, one of the things that jumped out at me in that talk, and I don't know if, I think you've had Heather MacDonald on the show? | ||
| Oh, many times. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| She's going to come on in a couple weeks. | ||
| Yeah, okay, so she's great at this. | ||
| Matt Thornton has a great book, The Gift of Violence, about this. | ||
| When he was talking about the police and the role of the police with young black men, I mean, that was just so contrary to what the data is. | ||
| Since George Floyd, homicide rates among Death among black men have gone up 50%. | ||
| In my own city of Portland, Oregon, they've gone up well over 200%, and that's another story. | ||
| I'm happy to get into it, but that's another story together. | ||
| Death by young black men, the number one cause of death is other young black men, and that's the only truth for those quote-unquote racial groups. | ||
| And so I think denial of reality and not stating We need to be blunt about facts and evidence and not couch them in political terms. | ||
| Now, when he talked about, you know, whatever his value systems are and how you can solve the problem, that's another thing. | ||
| But to blame the police for this or to say that the police are causally, you know, I can't remember exactly how he framed it. | ||
| Not only is that false, that's just a complete denial of reality. | ||
| Well, not only is it a denial of reality, but I think he does it as a bit of cover because he can't lose his radical base. | ||
| Okay, so that's the thing. | ||
| That's a political thing. | ||
| Okay, so that's the thing. | ||
| You need to signal to your base. | ||
| And so I think that there is, so I lost, just as an aside, I lost a thousand followers on my tweets last night, which I thought was kind of funny. | ||
| I hope I got one or two for you and I was kind of making fun of you. | ||
| You know, I just kept laughing about it because, you know, one, it's good to not be ideal, captured by your own audience, your audience capture. | ||
| But the other thing is, I think if you're not willing to cross the line and say, look, if somebody does something, not everything Ron DeSantis, if you're a lefty, does is bad or not everything. | ||
| But so many people, they're just not willing to cross the aisle and say, look, this is | ||
| true or this is false. | ||
| And you know, Harris was up there, you know, clapping, robotically clapping at these idiotic | ||
| things that are clearly divorced from reality. | ||
| I don't know in a two-party system what the solution to that is, given the penalty for | ||
| crossing the aisle. | ||
| Andrew Yang and others have suggested, well, that there is no solution, you have a third party, etc. | ||
| I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that the environment is so toxic right now for even saying you agree, or not only even that, platforming, going on someone's show. | ||
| I just talked to Brian Keating this morning. | ||
| You know, even going on someone's show when he did the PragerU videos and the grief people have gotten from that, that the left then won't have you on, because Constantine Kissin is another example. | ||
| I'm another example. | ||
| You're a perfect example. | ||
| I used to be able to go on all sorts of things. | ||
| I owe you an apology, by the way. | ||
| Uh-oh, what is that? | ||
| I owe you an apology. | ||
| Maybe we should say this off-air. | ||
| No, no, no, do it on air. | ||
| You know, you used to tell me that, you know, this whole shadow banning from Twitter and stuff, and I'm like, oh, dude, please, come on, like, but it turns out you were completely right. | ||
| Like, it was, you were telling me that all along, and I'm like, you know, I wasn't thinking it was a conspiracy theory, but now, you know, Jack goes before Kong, you basically lied. | ||
| He lied. | ||
| He lied. | ||
| He lied under oath. | ||
| I hope they get him for perjury. | ||
| He lied under oath. | ||
| He lied under oath. | ||
| As we're taping, well, the thing is, and what his lawyers will get him out of and why no one ever goes to jail on these things. | ||
| Oh, because they didn't call it shadowbanding. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| They didn't. | ||
| It was a linguistic trick. | ||
| They never called it shadowbanding. | ||
| What did they call it? | ||
| They called it, uh, what do they call it, guys? | ||
| It was de-something. | ||
| It was de-escalation. | ||
| What was it? | ||
| Yeah, visual filtering or contextual filtering, something like that. | ||
| So they were just playing with language constantly. | ||
| Well, that's the other thing everybody does is bamboozle everybody through language. | ||
| The woke people are particularly, the woke crowd are particularly good at that. | ||
| They just bamboozle people. | ||
| OK, so I have a feeling we probably have less disagreement on some of the policies than we may even think. | ||
| But on the race one, specifically, and that moment where he talked about how, you know, when you get pulled over, black and brown people, my children never had to be told that they had to keep their hands on the wheel and blah, blah. | ||
| I was actually told that. | ||
| That's what I said on my show this morning. | ||
| My dad said, the first time I went out driving with my dad, we went to H.B. | ||
| Thompson Middle School parking lot to go drive out there because, you know, it was a big area I could drive. | ||
| And before I even started doing anything, he said, he said, David, if you ever get pulled over, you keep your hands on. | ||
| He called you David? | ||
| Yeah, he called me David. | ||
| He still calls me David. | ||
| You keep your hands on the wheel. | ||
| And the fact that Biden went out of his way to racialize that, Totally. | ||
| And also black and brown, the implication being that somehow this is Indian people. | ||
| So, I don't know, have you had Wilford Riley on your show? | ||
| No, I've met him a few times. | ||
| I'll have him on. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| What a shame that we have to live in a society where I have to say to you, well, he's a black academician. | ||
| Like, that shouldn't have literally anything to do with it. | ||
| But he has some great data. | ||
| Should I tell you about my black friend last That's the other kind of point of commonality. | ||
| What should we do is we should be able to agree that there's a truth of the matter independent of whatever immutable characteristic you possess, right? | ||
| So if we can't agree to that, then there's just a... I mean, it really is incommensurable at that point. | ||
| But the fact that we consistently racialize this is a problem, but here's my pushback on that. | ||
| Because so many, and I do that thing for my YouTube channel where I go out and I ask random people questions and I put them on a line from neutral to strongly agree and strongly disagree and they walk to the side. | ||
| What do you call that by the way? | ||
| Spectrum street epistemology. | ||
| We're going to link to the channel below. | ||
| Street epistemology from my first book. | ||
| I was in Eastern Europe. | ||
| Is it better to be ruled? | ||
| It's better to be ruled by the USA than Russia or the USA than China. | ||
| All kinds of questions. | ||
| Homosexuality, abortion, trans, everything. | ||
| But consistently one of the things that I find in that is when I talk to black people, not African Americans, but black people, they are pissed. | ||
| And they're not even deeply concerned. | ||
| They're worried. | ||
| They're fed up. | ||
| And I think we need to have an honest conversation. | ||
| Like, is that imaginary? | ||
| Are those concerns they have, how rooted in reality are they? | ||
| Well, which concerns are you talking about? | ||
| When you make the distinction, you said not African-American. | ||
| So you're talking about when you're in Europe? | ||
| Well, people, for example, who just have dark skin. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, in Europe, for example, if they're not African-Americans because they're not Americans. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that's one thing I consistently find is that they are mad, they're frustrated, they don't know what to do, and I think we need to have some kind of an honest town hall debate that isn't captured by lunatics for what is the nature of, like, what are these, I don't like to use the word grievances because it's so fraught, but What are the perceived problems and what can we do to help people? | ||
| So what are you hearing as a perceived? | ||
| What would be that someone's angry about? | ||
| I mean, I can go through the list of watching MSNBC and I know what Joy Reid's screaming about, but give me an average person. | ||
| The list is that they don't have the same opportunities that White people have. | ||
| And I think if you look at the demographics of school systems and the funding of school systems, they're right. | ||
| But I don't think it's on racial lines. | ||
| I think it's on economic lines. | ||
| And then the mode, if you will, the distribution happens to be that more poor people are black than white as a percentage of the population. | ||
| But I think it starts... We'd also have to talk about why that is, because more black people were educated and in two-parent homes until the welfare state in the early 70s. | ||
| Thomas Sowell is going to say that. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| So it has a lot to do with the Democrat policies, not just that the system is inherently racist. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So how do we get beyond, how do we speak bluntly about facts and evidence without having the Democrats go berserk or the Republicans go berserk? | ||
| How do we just say, listen, this is the data, we need to make the best available, the best policies based upon the best available evidence without people losing their freaking minds? | ||
| Like, I don't know. | ||
| Well, I do have a theory on that. | ||
|
unidentified
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No, go ahead. | |
| I mean, it's what we're doing here in Florida. | ||
| Which is? | ||
| We have a highly competent government that is run by someone who is clearly articulating what their beliefs are. | ||
| And when they try to bring crazy trans gender identity into schools, nope, we're not going to do that. | ||
| When they try to connect woke ideology to African American studies, nope, we're not going to do that. | ||
| We're not going to let a place like Disney, which is zero tolerance for madness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I think that that actually is the only answer. | ||
| I don't know that at a societal level, a countrywide level, I don't know that you can scale that, or at least from the top. | ||
| I guess my concern is, and I haven't been following that closely, my concern is I would want to make sure that no speech would be quelched in that process. | ||
| So if you want to have someone spouting some idiocy like critical race theory, that's fine. | ||
| And I know I have significant disagreements with people on this. | ||
| You know, I think I initially said, you know, you wouldn't have people, if someone wants to, you know, scream about phrenology or about the earth being 5,000 years old, but these are dangerous, divisive, toxic, and racist beliefs. | ||
| There's also a difference between talking about them and teaching them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You can talk about the Nazis, you wouldn't want to teach Nazi ideology. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And testing people in terms of the right ideas that students that answered back. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That accords with the ideological precepts. | ||
| So I'm, I'm concerned about that. | ||
| So you gave me your solution. | ||
| I'm going to give you my solution. | ||
| So my solution is burn the whole thing down. | ||
| My solution is that we need to build new things. | ||
| We need to build new institutions. | ||
| So I'm going to burn a tremendous number of bridges when I say this. | ||
| I'm just going to tell you because I'm going to speak bluntly. | ||
| You're in a burning mood. | ||
| I've been in a burning mood for quite a while now. | ||
| And I don't mean burn them down physically of course. | ||
| I mean let them fall into further delegitimizing themselves because they're not legitimate. | ||
| Basically you're saying give them a push. | ||
| They're on the way anyway. | ||
| So every single attempt at saving them or fighting for free speech or this guy got canceled because he showed the picture of the Prophet Muhammad which by the way is on Wikipedia that now certain countries don't want on and if you look at the Islamic Wikipedia still if you go to the museums in Turkey there are Drawings of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, but bracketing that for a side, as an aside, any attempt to fix or solve the problem is only slowing it down. | ||
| The problem cannot be solved. | ||
| We have tremendous DEI bureaucracies. | ||
| We have people who have jobs for life. | ||
| We have colleges of education that are the worst of the worst. | ||
| We have to build new things. | ||
| University of Austin, Ralston College, Peterson is building a new platform. | ||
| That's the solution to this problem. | ||
| Let them just fall into, let them get what they deserve. | ||
| Well A, I agree with that. | ||
| I had Stephen Blackwood in that very chair talking about Ralston and he's obviously doing that with Jordan. | ||
| What's happening here in Florida now with Chris Ruffo is going to sit on the board of I believe it's New School on the West Coast and they're going to Try to fix what's going on over, because even in Florida our institutions were captured by this stuff too. | ||
| How important is it do you think, I mean as someone that you care deeply about academia, I mean how important is it that kids even go to college at this point? | ||
| I think the...well, let me just back up a second. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wokeism is a universal solvent. | ||
| It will destroy everything and anything it touches. | ||
| And so I'm incredibly sympathetic to having a zero, like the Hungarians have a zero policy. | ||
| There's like...we're letting none of this in, like zero. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the best answer to your question is what I told my kids. | ||
| You know my kids. | ||
| I told my daughter who wants to go to college, don't do it, be an electrician. | ||
| Oh, that's the other thing I tweeted last night. | ||
| We need to be talking more about vocational education. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Vital. | ||
| What did your daughter say to that? | ||
| She entertained it, but she wants to go to college. | ||
| And I can't say I'm disappointed. | ||
| Like, I will do, you know, I want her to live her life and pursue it. | ||
| My parents paid for my education, although at the time it wasn't an ideology mill. | ||
| But I think my advice to young kids would be And it's not to go to a conservative university like Liberty. | ||
| The solution to this stuff... | ||
| to ideological capture is not to create institutions that have the opposite ideology. | ||
| The solution is to create new institutions that are truth-based, that have genuine intellectual diversity. | ||
| So, my suggestion would be to send your kids to vocational school. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting on the liberty front, I'm only mentioning this because I was invited there, I spoke at their Sunday convocation, 14,000 kids, huge, huge, absolute, 14,000. | ||
| They know I'm married to a man. | ||
| They know, as I still describe myself, begrudgingly pro-choice. | ||
| There's a couple other things that I certainly am not a traditional conservative on. | ||
| Standing ovation from these kids. | ||
| Spent the entire day walking around the school taking selfies with kids. | ||
| I want to give you a hug for that, but we're on Fog of Delirium. | ||
| I think Lindsay was the only person who was an atheist who's ever been invited to speak before. | ||
| So what does that tell you then about the conservative, even in this case, and you as a guy that wrote a book called Emanuel for Creating Atheists, you spend an awful lot of time around religious people now. | ||
| Awful, awful. | ||
| You spend an awful lot of time around conservatives now. | ||
| They're my primary allies right now. | ||
| So your primary allies seem to be, from what I can tell, Christian conservatives. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And sort of more, I don't know, people from maybe a more nationalist political camp, certainly than you consider yourself from or something like that. | ||
| So what do you do with that? | ||
| Yeah, or people like Marc Andreessen who just basically think that the system is corrupt like I do and we need to build, you know, that's the new culture war, by the way, legacy institutions versus building new things, old universe, like Substack versus New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc. | ||
| Locals, perfect. | ||
|
unidentified
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100%. | |
| Some people have been building new things. | ||
| That's, well, you're a builder. | ||
| I lost thread of the conversation. | ||
| So, well, this odd alliance that you're now in, as someone that was, that you were literally, your mission at first, at least at one time, was to create atheists. | ||
| I also do want to talk about how the atheist movement has seemingly collapsed, but let's pause on that for a second. | ||
| So that your allies are now the people that you maybe used to want to Yeah, so I think, while I've never converted anyone, I just gave them the tools to convert themselves, just to be clear. | ||
| So I think that this Culture War 2.0 is very different from 1.0. | ||
| I published a piece on this in the American Mind years ago. | ||
| But, excuse me, it's We're unified in objective truth, that you can figure out what it is, that you can find it. | ||
| We're unified on the rules of engagement. | ||
| So the rules of engagement is, if someone gives a talk and you don't like the talk, you don't blow a bullhorn at the talk. | ||
| Like, there are rational, civil ways to adjudicate disputes, you know, legal mechanisms. | ||
| If you don't like the statue here in Miami, I don't know, in Portland they destroyed a deer statue. | ||
| Great, you go through democratic means and have, I mean, I couldn't care less which statues are there, but you don't, Take the law into your own hands to correct Judge Judy. | ||
| So there's an agreement that there are mechanisms that we can go to to figure out how to solve civil issues, civil disputes. | ||
| So that's the other thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So are you shocked though, even at this point, even though we've been, if people go back and watch our videos from six years ago, they'll find us talking about these same things, me from a more lefty perspective as well. | ||
| But the point is, Are you shocked that there's virtually no liberals, obviously not none, and Omar is doing it, and I know you know two or three others, but what you're talking about are liberal principles not defended by liberals. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| And I think that what conservative and liberalism has shifted, but I'm going to suggest a new access to you. | ||
| The new access is, and Andrew, my friend Andrew, our friend Andrew Doyle wrote about that book, in his book The New Puritans, the access of the way to think about these problems isn't liberal-conservative right-left, it's authoritarian-non-authoritarian. | ||
| And the most important thing is cognitive liberty. | ||
| We have to enable people to, like in London there, Arresting people for praying. | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, I think anybody should be able to talk to themselves anywhere they want. | |
| If I want to talk to myself, it'd be a little odd if I started talking to myself right now. | ||
| The idea that you would arrest somebody for that, you have a group of people, the woke people, the dominant moral orthodoxy, who wants to tell you exactly what to think, and if you don't think it, you're a problem. | ||
| Right, that we need some kind of a struggle session, we need to somehow correct this, we need to intervene, we need to have government sponsorships, programs, interventions. | ||
| I suggest the access in the culture war is best thought of As authoritarians versus non-authoritarians. | ||
| Right, so basically there's authoritarians or libertarians, not meaning you're a libertarian card-carrying member of the libertarian party, but you either want control or you don't want control. | ||
| Something roughly like that. | ||
| Yeah, and I want to let people pursue whatever lives they want to lead. | ||
| So you acknowledge that that is far more rich on the right or the conservative side of the aisle now, right? | ||
| I will acknowledge that the left has a terrible problem. | ||
| That is unthinkable among traditional leftists. | ||
| That it's been parasitized by wokeism. | ||
| It's been parasitized by an invasive ideology. | ||
| I wrote about that in my first book. | ||
| That is not inherent in the left. | ||
| And, you know, it's guilt by association. | ||
| It's not even guilt that I'm here. | ||
| It'd be like somebody else won't talk to me because, oh, I've been on Tucker Carlson twice. | ||
| Oh, you were on Rubin's show. | ||
| Well, so what? | ||
| So yeah, there's no question that there's a tremendous problem with that. | ||
| So it seems to me that the inmates are running the asylum on one side, and there is another side now that is doing basically what you're asking, that perhaps you have some political disagreements with. | ||
| And as I kind of went through, I think those things will just kind of become less and less over time. | ||
| I think that's just the natural entropy of it. | ||
| But what would you say is a problem? | ||
| What do you see on the conservative side? | ||
| Now, I'll just, look, I'm married, I'm gay. | ||
| So there are obviously traditional religious conservatives that are not thrilled with that, for sure. | ||
| To be sure. | ||
| And yet I have found most of them to be the most loving, pleasant, interesting, decent, welcoming people on the planet. | ||
| I'd probably even add supportive to that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what would be something that you're seeing as a red flag on that side that you're like, oh, this is where you guys are just absolutely getting it wrong. | ||
| This is where I cannot vote for the same people that you vote for. | ||
| I'll tell you a few things. | ||
| We'll bracket the gay marriage thing. | ||
| And we'll bracket the Ukraine thing because that's another thing, that's another can of worms. | ||
| In terms of domestic policy, I would say it's one of the reasons I still consider myself, well I consider myself a classical liberal is, I believe every Citizen, every person born in this country has certain entitlements. | ||
| I believe that they're entitled to a public education of the first rate, a la John Rawls. | ||
| I believe that they're, up to age 18, they're entitled to at least two square meals a day. | ||
| I don't think people should be discriminated against educationally in terms of their zip code or where they're from or the color of their skin or their religious beliefs. | ||
| Hold on, I just have to pause you for a second, because I'm not sure what conservative believes in anything other than, you know, they may not want to fund certain things through the government, but... | ||
| Okay, then I'll tell you the other substantive disagreements. | ||
| Just say real quickly, then I'll put a pin in that. | ||
| I also believe that that includes health care for people up to 18, possibly 21 as a compromise. | ||
| I don't think anybody should be sick or dying because in this country, if they're a citizen, if their parents can't afford adequate health care for them. | ||
| Insulin, which Biden discussed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um, so I think that's one of the things that separates me and you see, you know, it seems to me that just, I want to just clearly get it. | |
| So it seems to me you still believe that the state has some role in education and in health care. | ||
| And you feel that the conservative side or the Republicans just simply don't believe that. | ||
| On the school choice one that you said there, where you wanted to choose to go to school, | ||
| that's clearly a Republican position, not a Democrat position. | ||
| Okay, I'm talking about funding of K-12 education. | ||
| But there's a guy on my board, National Progress Alliance, a non-profit, | ||
| who ran for, who's a conservative, who are atheist conservative, you know, I think is a | ||
| suicide of the West. | ||
| Jonah Goldberg, first line of the book is, you know, there is no God. | ||
| He's an arch-conservative. | ||
| He had a really interesting proposal. | ||
| He wanted to turn every school in the city of Portland into a charter school of choice. | ||
| So they all had their missions and they could choose. | ||
| So that's what I'm talking about. | ||
| We can have a compromise on this stuff, right? | ||
| What I'm saying is you're taking So each parent would be given an amount of money, right, and then they could go to whatever school they wanted to. | ||
| Of course, many on the left went berserk, and they said, well, how can you, what if you want to go to a school on the other side of town? | ||
| Okay, look, I mean, the system isn't, like, you can only do what you can do to make things... Right, but I think you're making my argument. | ||
| Are you not? | ||
| Because my question was, what do you think are, what are sort of the red line issues that you don't agree on? | ||
| The defunding of public schools, the non, I don't know if you want to call it socialized healthcare, but... Right, okay, so health, you want the government definitely involved in healthcare. | ||
| That seems to be pretty different. | ||
| Up to 18. | ||
| Yeah, okay, alright. | ||
| But I can go for 21. | ||
| Right, the school one, I think you're making more of the conservative argument on school choice. | ||
| Well, I was bracketing the school choice as a possible compromise because the federal | ||
| government still has to go, the state government. | ||
| So we need to also do away with the zip code idea, like that the zip code you're in determines | ||
| the school. | ||
| Absolutely, school choice, funds students. | ||
| That's a poison. | ||
| Funds students, not systems. | ||
| That's a poison, right? | ||
| Because that guarantees, you know, Bush had no child left behind. | ||
| That guarantees the kids get, who are poor particularly, and I don't think it's a racial | ||
| thing, get trapped in failing schools. | ||
| So we need to be more thoughtfully and work with people across the aisle who hold different opinions. | ||
| But those ideas, you know, in the far right, the extreme right, I don't even know what that means anymore, but you have people who want the defunding, the libertarian side of the public school system. | ||
| So that's two differences. | ||
| Other differences, abortion, for example. | ||
| You know, that's a thorny issue. | ||
| I'm not sure how, especially with the new Supreme Court decisions and the state choices. | ||
| So you're obviously pro-choice. | ||
| How did you feel about the Roe v. Wade decision, just kicking it back to the states where it was originally? | ||
| I wasn't happy about it. | ||
| You know one of the things I do in that those videos where I go around I ask people I do a lot about abortion and I'll say so they'll start on the neutral line and I'll say abortion should be allowed legal up to the first trimester and they'll go from strongly agree to strongly disagree and then I'll say abortion should be legal in the second time I reset them at the neutral line and then I'll say abortion should be legal in a third trimester and then I'll say I did this at Dartmouth abortion should be legal up to the last day Because you would see, you want to see what it takes to get people to move. | ||
| And a shocking number of people will not move up to the last day. | ||
| So I think that there are, I think abortion in the first trimester Not constitutionally protected, but federally protected would be a compromise. | ||
| Wait, sorry, what do you mean by that? | ||
| Not constitutionally protected, but federally protected? | ||
| Yeah, federally protected so that there would be a legal right for women to have an abortion in the first trimester. | ||
| Right, so to me, what Florida has done, and I can always bring everything back to Florida because I really think we're doing it so well here, we have a 15-week ban. | ||
| DeSantis signed that, and the legislature passed it before the Roe v. Wade decision came down. | ||
| And what's fascinating about that was, here we have this state that is now super red. | ||
| It is the leading Republican state in the union, and it has a 15 weeks. | ||
| That's three and a half months, having two kids now. | ||
| I know an awful lot about that developmental stage, heartbeats and all that kind of thing. | ||
| Nobody was going crazy over it here. | ||
| And this would prove my point on the conservative side. | ||
| The conservatives here, are actually just taking the liberal position of 25 years | ||
| ago. | ||
| Meaning every sane liberal of 25 years ago, a Bill Clinton 1996 liberal, | ||
| had some moderate position on abortion. | ||
| There's going to be a cutoff. | ||
| It's the Democrats that went bananas with 8-month abortions where Florida, right now, again, the reddest of the red | ||
| states, has the 25-year-ago liberal position, and that is now the | ||
| conservative position. | ||
| Which, by the way, would piss off the most conservative conservatives. | ||
| I think you see that in so many things. | ||
| But, you know, one thing you said that I'm thinking of, you mentioned heartbeat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know that in Hungary, it's a law that you, before you get an abortion, you have to listen to the fetus's heartbeat? | ||
| Well. | ||
| Isn't that interesting? | ||
| Which, according to Stacey Abrams, it's not an actual heartbeat. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's an echo of some sort of... | |
| Right. | ||
| But what does that tell you, even that right there? | ||
| So the argument you're making, from your liberal perspective, is the policy of the most conservative place in America. | ||
| It tells me with that and with censorship, you know, the N.W.A., or whatever you want to say, that, you know, Tipper Gore is against the music, that those policy positions have had a large-scale shift. | ||
| Now, you've been saying it for a long time, to be a conservative means to defend liberal values. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think that there's a profound truth in that. | ||
| We have far more, not we, but the general we have far more in common than people think. | ||
| Okay, so I think most people watching this are probably going, alright, I tend to agree with a little more of Dave's politics, but Pete's making sense. | ||
| They want to live in a country with someone like you, the same way they want to live in a country with someone like me. | ||
| But what we're still dancing around, I suppose, is what do you do, well first off, how do we quantify how many woke people there are and what level of power they still have? | ||
| Because that stuff is still Hold on, hold on. | ||
| Before we get to that, I would argue that virtually everybody wants to live in your America and my America. | ||
| Because your America and my America are the same. | ||
| They're identical in, I would assume, at least one way. | ||
| You want people to have liberty. | ||
| I want people to have liberty. | ||
| I want people to make their own choices and be responsible for those choices. | ||
| I believe in truth. | ||
| You believe in truth. | ||
| We might disagree about Biden's slurring or whatever it is, but we want to live in a society that basically has the rule of law. | ||
| I got something to eat before I was coming over here and I was walking out and some guy tried to chop me for no reason. | ||
| In Miami? | ||
| Yeah, you know, just right down the block at that supermarket down there. | ||
| Some guy just tried to chop me. | ||
| So I think that your America In my America, the Americas that we're living in have far more in common than people think. | ||
| And I think that these policy decisions, those things can be worked out. | ||
| We can figure that stuff out. | ||
| Well, it seems to me that there are sort of slight disagreement here is you still think that there's a little more utility for the state or at least at the federal level than I do. | ||
| And I accept that. | ||
| I would also say that if it worked... Particularly with the welfare of minors. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| So Peter Thiel once said something to me that really rung true to me. | ||
| He said, I wouldn't be a libertarian if any of it worked. | ||
| And I think that that maybe is the position I'm coming from more. | ||
| So I like government when government is effective and competent and efficient. | ||
| That's what we have here in Florida. | ||
| When you have this other endless sucking machine that is taking money from everyone and resources from everyone and spending ten billion dollars to study asexual monkeys and their relationships to blind frogs, there's no question. | ||
| You know, one third of the taxes collected in 2020 or 2021, yeah, 2020, went to pay the interest on the deficit. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Everybody's screaming about, you know, sustainability. | ||
| That's the most unsustainable thing. | ||
| And wait until the dollar doesn't become the global currency reserve. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Wait till China says, hey, we'd like you to pay off our debts. | ||
| It's a good thing we have nukes. | ||
| So, OK, so so understanding that, I think you're right about that. | ||
| And by the way, when I did Bill Maher's podcast and we disagreed on a whole bunch of stuff, actually more than you and I are disagreeing out here because he's really has this wild stuff with Trump still and whatever. | ||
| What he said at the end was, he said if you and I are not within the acceptable boundaries of what a society can tolerate as differences of opinion, we're totally screwed. | ||
| I mean, I think that's the right approach on that. | ||
| But what do you do for the, whatever amount of people, the woke thing has infected, it continues to infect people, and we're in a race, it seems to me. | ||
| We're red-pilling people left and right. | ||
| I see this happening all the time with my own audience, and I go out into, go to the supermarket, people saying to me, I didn't believe any of this stuff two weeks ago, then I saw your show. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I just had that same experience in Austria. | ||
| Right, and you do it, you're literally doing it for a living. | ||
| This is all I do. | ||
| But the race is what I'm talking about. | ||
| So we're red-pilling. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| We're getting people to see reality. | ||
| The woke thing's still infecting all of those things. | ||
| As you said, it gets in that system and destroys. | ||
| So how do we quantify? | ||
| Are we winning? | ||
| Are we losing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, so we got to slow down. | |
| Okay, I'm giving you an hour. | ||
| So let's talk about what the woke control. | ||
| They have complete control of the university systems. | ||
| They have the DEI, bureaucracies, etc. | ||
| They have control of most legacy institutions. | ||
| The two things that almost nobody talks about, because almost nobody knows that they control, and the damage they do, is they control colleges of education and Wikipedia. | ||
| Okay, so let's break that down if I may. | ||
| I can't teach with all my publications, years, etc., doctorates, etc. | ||
| I can't walk in a classroom and teach. | ||
| You have to get a teaching certificate. | ||
| Teaching certificates in this country, I'm going to say this, and this is, people are going to be like, no way, that can't possibly be true. | ||
| It's solely predictable. | ||
| Actually, Peterson spoke about this. | ||
| I think he's working on some of this. | ||
| Yeah, he's working on this. | ||
| It's predicated upon a book from a Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. | ||
| The idea is that you teach to liberate people from, you didn't say perceive, but perceive oppression, as opposed to teaching for anything else like the truth. | ||
| We've educated an entire generation of teachers, pre-service teacher education programs, people are going to get their, future teachers, go into the classroom and teach. | ||
| to demean truth and to uphold certain non-falsifiable ideological ideas like | ||
| lived experience, lived experience trunks objective truth, etc, etc. | ||
| So that's an enormous problem. And the reason that's a problem is even if you could take out all wokeism | ||
| Like, you literally extirpated it from all K-12 schools. | ||
| It would just repopulate because the teachers would go back in. | ||
| And that's the other reason why we need to build new things like the University of Austin is because we need teacher training programs for people who have not been indoctrinated into the tenets of woke ideology. | ||
| Okay, so the second thing that nobody talks about is that Wikipedia is woke. | ||
| The editors of Wikipedia. | ||
| Oh yeah, it's wildly out of control. | ||
| Yeah, and so we're going to do something on that that breaks that down and explains the racket and the scam that it is. | ||
| You know, my Wikipedia page is consistently vandalized. | ||
| It's hijacked by a few people. | ||
| Yours is as well, I've looked. | ||
| Okay, so we got those two things. | ||
| It is almost impossible to underestimate the degree that woke infiltration has played in society, in our institutions. | ||
| Look, having spent a few days with Elon at Twitter, he knows that there were bad actors, woke activists. | ||
| Yeah, he called it a giant crime scene. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was a giant. | ||
| I just spoke to Michael Schellenberg, who's a good friend of mine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We just, you know, it was a giant crime scene. | ||
| And the idea is that woke people They, you know, they get indoctrinated into the school system. | ||
| They go out from...well, it starts in K-12 because, again, their teachers get teaching certificates that are indoctrinated. | ||
| They go through college. | ||
| They then, because they have the college degree, go into positions of authority in the society. | ||
| And then, slowly but surely, the terminology comes in. | ||
| Safe spaces, microaggressions, trigger warnings. | ||
| Inclusion is a huge one that nobody talks about anymore, very few people talk about. | ||
| They have infiltrated virtually every industry, economy, they've infiltrated the military, they've infiltrated the Biden government, they've infiltrated the Southern Baptist, they've infiltrated the Catholic Church, so the question is, What do we do about it? | ||
| And I have a whole set of prescriptions that we could talk about. | ||
| Okay, so there's the build new things version of it. | ||
| There's the argue with people to show them the light sort of thing. | ||
| Not argue with them, but ask them questions. | ||
| Talk, communicate with them. | ||
| Listen and communicate. | ||
| But I'm still curious about this thing. | ||
| Do you think we can outrun it? | ||
| Do you think that this parasite that has overtaken so many hosts As I always describe it, you know, the alien in the ship killing everybody and the doctor likes it, the original alien, because he's like, it's merciless. | ||
| It's doing exactly what it wants. | ||
| You've got to give it credit. | ||
| He feels a camaraderie with it because it is so focused and it's accomplishing what it wants to accomplish. | ||
| Do you think we can outrun it? | ||
|
unidentified
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100%. | |
| I'm 100% positive. | ||
| Even if we have an entire generation of young people coming behind us that are going to be more energetic than us and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| It's not sustainable. | ||
| Yeah, and I'll tell you why it's not sustainable. | ||
| It has no, by design, it has no apologetic. | ||
| It has no defense built into it. | ||
| Woke people don't know the other side of the argument by design because it's platforming, it's Nazism, they won't read it, they won't look at it. | ||
| Even, you know, not even things like gender studies, but there is no debate. | ||
| There is no conversation. | ||
| And when you take debate and conversation out of it, you just go ever further down into a rabbit hole. | ||
| But just recently, the last few days in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, they've had pieces coming out, even the New York Times, which is the wokest of them all. | ||
| I think they hired McWhorter to kind of save their image, etc. | ||
| You see now people starting to question, people starting to challenge, people speaking openly about it. | ||
| And unfortunately, they're doing it in the most superficial manifestation, which is cancel culture, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, so what do we do? | |
| What do we do about the fact that we have ideological capture of our main institutions? | ||
| Well, let's talk about what the problem with that is first. | ||
| The problem is that those institutions don't have any legitimacy. | ||
| You don't, however you want to call this, the legitimation crisis. | ||
| There's a crisis of legitimacy. | ||
| A lot of people, I've been screaming about this for years, nobody listens, but the reason for that is they don't have legitimacy because they're not legitimate. | ||
| So people don't trust them. | ||
| So that's why, to bring it back to what I said at the beginning of the show, we need something we can rely on. | ||
| We need some gold standard. | ||
| Something that universally aligns us politically, socially, morally, and that should be the peer review process. | ||
| If something gets stamped as peer review, we can say the best minds have tried to falsify it, experts in the fields have tried to look at it, and I also want to say, Yeah, but you accept that the inherent problem is that the woke will never accept that, because they will say it is an old system. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| That's why we need to destroy it. | ||
| We need to build new things. | ||
| That's also why we need ideological diversity. | ||
| You know, people will say, well, why should I trust the science on, the science, they'll put in quotation marks, on global climate change, anthropogenic warming, if the university is staffed with 99% ultra-leftists? | ||
| Well, they're right. | ||
| That's absolutely right. | ||
| I mean, that's why when the Supreme Court is balanced, you know, 5-4, conservative, liberals, maybe a far-righter, a far-lefter, that's why people are more likely to trust those decisions. | ||
| So, ideological diversity confers a kind of legitimation on a system. | ||
| It legitimizes a system in a way that simply saying it's legitimate or have good branding, or now the New York Times has bad branding. | ||
| Well, it was all the news that's fit to print, and now it's all the propaganda that's fit to slur. | ||
| But now it's been ideological capture. | ||
| ACLU, SPLC, things we used to trust. | ||
| For hate groups, for example, we can't trust those. | ||
| And I will tell you, to repeat it again, one of the biggest problems that nobody's talking about is Wikipedia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, it is a problem. | ||
| I wonder, where is it being then used that it matters? | ||
| So, like, I gave up years ago trying to contact them and try to correct things. | ||
| There's no point to it. | ||
| It's just pointless. | ||
| It's just pointless. | ||
| But where is it being used that it matters? | ||
| Like, does it matter that much? | ||
| Like, do you think because people are actually trying to find out about people and trust it? | ||
| I'm even hesitant to say this because now people who are doing this to me are going to double down on it. | ||
| So I don't even know how many books I've written the foreword to. | ||
| I've written the foreword to a lot of books. | ||
| I just wrote the foreword to Rajiv Malhotra's Snakes in the Ganga. | ||
| I've written the foreword to John Loftus' book. | ||
| I've written the foreword to Lindsay's book. | ||
| Tons of forewords. | ||
| But I wrote the foreword to Dan Arrow's book, who's now a woke maniac. | ||
| I wrote the foreword to Stefan Molyneux's book, Against the Gods. | ||
| It was about agnosticism. | ||
| And of all the forewords I wrote, it's in there. | ||
| Not only that, he wrote the foreword to white supremacist Stefan Molyneux, as if You know, I'm somehow in a long-standing collaborative relationship, as if I'm in some kind of cahoots with a white supremacist to talk about whites, you know, the superior race. | ||
| But those things are incredibly damaged because they're bundled with the software when you get them. | ||
| They're bundled with browsers there. | ||
| And so when people want to learn about something quickly, they go to Wikipedia. | ||
| There are 50 edits. | ||
| This is a whole other show. | ||
| So, the way that those decisions get made, the guy who edits my page is openly Antifa. | ||
| It's interesting because I think you could probably, and this is what Elon was saying | ||
| about a crime scene, you can probably make this same argument for almost every big tech | ||
| company that there is. | ||
| There was a while where I was being doxed on Reddit and horrible things were happening | ||
| on there. | ||
| I contacted someone extremely high up at Reddit, like VP level, and they basically were like, | ||
| you have to submit a support ticket. | ||
| And I was like, well, I'm being doxed, I could have someone show up at my house and kill | ||
| me, these are people who are obsessively hating on me, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Well, you have to, and I do the ticket, nothing comes of it. | ||
| And it's like, you guys, it's as if the system is designed to let the worst ideas flourish. | ||
| Not as if, maybe as if I'm being too generous. | ||
| It's designed to let a small group of radical activists, who are not necessarily radical, | ||
| who encourage violence, who really, there's no polite way to say it. | ||
| You know, they're just dyspeptic malcontents. | ||
| And they, I don't know what these people do. | ||
| They must have no lives and no jobs, and all they do is hate. | ||
| Like I see this stuff on Reddit, like they go crazy on you, they go crazy on me, | ||
| they're going crazy on everybody. | ||
| So that's the thing that I also. | ||
| I think they've helped the trajectory, honestly. | ||
| Do you really? | ||
| Well, I think they've also helped me, like, first off, at this point, I just don't care, | ||
| but it never stopped me. | ||
| anything, it was fueling my desire for success. | ||
| And I didn't realize it when it used to bother me. | ||
| Now it's just like, alright, keep going. | ||
| I also think it's funny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're waking up like Dave Rubin is the biggest problem. | |
| I think you're in another level than I am. | ||
| Do you remember when we were walking when we got ice cream? | ||
| No, we're good, we're good. | ||
| Do you remember when we got ice cream? | ||
| That was my look, we're going to continue because he's doing okay this time. | ||
| We're always 50-50 with you. | ||
| Yes, we were getting ice cream, I remember. | ||
| The Twitter eggs went with my son, and you said if a guy came up to you with a Twitter egg right now and started screaming at you, you remember that? | ||
| And I really thought about it. | ||
| Why should you... Wait, just to be clear, we were walking down the street going to get ice cream with your son, and we were talking about this endless hatred that people get online, and I was saying how if someone across the street just started screaming, You wouldn't walk up to them and engage them and spend time with them and all of those things, right? | ||
| You would just keep walking but for some reason there was this need for people to do it online. | ||
| With the anonymity as a cloak and so my fear, so two things, my fear is always been that I've got something wrong and the way that I can figure out if I've got something wrong is to listen to dissenting And that's what I said on your show last time. | ||
| I think I missed a word, but the most important thing is you have to figure out whose voice doesn't matter. | ||
| Like, this is a great example. | ||
| Like, this brings it back to what we talked about. | ||
| Are you drunk tweeting right now? | ||
| Like, so when you tell me something like, okay, Gabe Rubin said that, you know, if Dawkins contacts me, like, okay, Now I've got to stop and think about this, but if it's a random person, you don't, there's no point to even looking at it, right? | ||
| But I do think that there is, that there is something, if I could give advice to people, if I could give advice, I don't know where I looked, advice, if I could give advice to you, you have to figure out whose voice doesn't matter. | ||
| And if you have, if you're being mobbed on social media or people are freaking out at you, like, so what? | ||
| Like, it's just, this too shall pass. | ||
| It's just people who have way too much time on their hands. | ||
| You know, the other thing I've learned going around the world asking people questions like political questions or controversial questions is when you leave the United States, People are not looking for a reason to be offended. | ||
| In the United States, particularly in college campuses, they are hungry to be offended. | ||
| They are craving offense. | ||
| They want to show what a good person they are, what a decent person, what a virtuous person they are by how outraged they are that someone's on a different line or has a difference of opinion from them. | ||
| I mean, you seem to have done a far better job of getting, like I, you did it more quickly. | ||
| I'm slowly at that point. | ||
| But I have not... You mean getting over the nonsense? | ||
| Yeah, of just... Well, I also think if you don't give them what they want, which at some point when I just was like, I'm never responding to these people, I'm never paying attention, I'm not giving it a moment of my public or private time, at some point they just start running out of fuel because what they also want is the reaction. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| There is nothing that makes, you know, one of these nihilistic kids happier than... 100%. | ||
| And that's the other thing, they already hate you. | ||
| Yeah, they short of you groveling which would make them hate you more. There's literally nothing you can say | ||
| And I already hate the irony and I absolutely know this is true of you is if someone came to me if someone sent me | ||
| A thoughtful email saying and by the way, I get something like this every now and again, you know, Dave | ||
| Actually, you were talking about taxes right this and that and I disagree with you on this. Here's why but I will | ||
| address it I like it. | ||
| We do a post-game show on my show now where I'm trying to get people to correct me. | ||
| Genuinely. | ||
| If I screwed something up, but that's different than the nihilistic destruction. | ||
| That's called integrity. | ||
| Speaking of integrity, Pete, this is the last time you can do the show. | ||
| This is it? | ||
| I'm no longer a friend of the show? | ||
| I'm thrown off? | ||
| I'm now an enemy of the show? | ||
| Do you have anything else you'd like to say? | ||
| A man of great integrity? | ||
| You saw Nancy Pelosi after Biden's speech. | ||
| She does this weird thing with her hands now, too. | ||
| He's a wonderful man, an aspirational man, an incredible man. | ||
| I saw Chris Christie, too. | ||
| And again, he wasn't talking about the dementia thing or whatever. | ||
| Anything else you'd like to say? | ||
| I got one more for you. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Here, I'm going to give you a great out. | ||
| Anything you want. | ||
| No, I had something, but go ahead. | ||
| You can go with that one too, but I have one more question for you and then I'll let you give your closing statement. | ||
| My question for you is this. | ||
| Being here in Florida, taking this entire conversation that we've had, the beautiful weather, the freedom, a system that's working, flourishing, getting rid of all the things that you're frustrated with. | ||
| Could a good liberal like you vote for a guy like Ron DeSantis? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who's he running against? | |
| He's running against Joe Biden, or he's running against Kamala Harris. | ||
| Oh, you mean for president? | ||
| Gavin Newsom, yeah. | ||
| Okay, you named two of those three people I have very serious problems with. | ||
| It seems to me he is the guy addressing more of the issues that you're talking about than anyone else. | ||
| And defending people's ability to live freely. | ||
| So here's what I would do. | ||
| Rather than just capriciously answer it, you're looking at me like, come on, man. | ||
| No, I'm telling you. | ||
| I would look at what his positions are. | ||
| The answer to your question is yes. | ||
| But before I gave that yes, I would look at what his positions were, and I would balance those out against the person he was running against. | ||
| But yeah, I see no reason why I wouldn't vote for a Republican if they had more evidence-based positions, for sure. | ||
| Is that fair? | ||
| You couched it like a liberal, but I accept that. | ||
| Okay, I'll take that as a plus. | ||
| And now I give you open floor to end this properly, the way you wanted to end it. | ||
| I want to come back to something we said at the beginning. | ||
| If you have a disagreement with somebody, then you just text them and tell them you have a disagreement with them. | ||
| It's completely fine that you and I would have a disagreement about abortion or DeSantis or even things closer to our own heart, you know? | ||
| And, you know, if you told me, listen, you know, you're, uh, I would have a problem with it, but I would, I would have a problem with it within the context of our conversation. | ||
| If you said, listen, I think the fact that you've adopted a Chinese, uh, girl is an interracial kidnapping. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So we, that, okay. | ||
| We, we would have a conversation about that. | ||
| That might be a bridge too far, yeah. | ||
| Well, no, it would hurt me. | ||
| I would, I'd feel hurt, but I'd also. | ||
| In fact, that is what you, yes. | ||
| That's your actual life. | ||
| Yeah, I'd also want to know why you thought that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And also, but I think letting friends be wrong is one of the most important lessons that we can have. | ||
| And I also think it makes your life more interesting and you have more spirited disagreements with the people. | ||
| You know, Aristotle talks about that in the Ethics. | ||
| He said, the highest form of friendship is between two virtuous people. | ||
| I thought about that for decades since I've read that. | ||
| Like, somebody, you know, you can come to me and I can come to you if I think you're off base. | ||
| I will absolutely tell you're off base. | ||
| And I think we've had those conversations before. | ||
| You've told that to me. | ||
| Those are the kind of friendships you should strive to have as opposed to everybody agreeing with everyone and to disagree about one small thing and then everyone's a Nazi. | ||
| You want to go get drunk and fight some random people? | ||
| Well, I don't know about the latter, but maybe the former. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about academia, check out our Academia playlist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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