March 19, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:03:03
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| The kind of reforms and incremental improvement that the current system is capable of delivering are insufficient. | ||
| So some form of radical reorganization is required. | ||
| And I would say that to focus primarily on where is power coalescing, is it observable? | ||
| Are there giant corporations that are wealthier than nations? | ||
| Well, that's an interesting area to look at. | ||
| Are there powerful energy companies that are still being offered subsidies? | ||
| They're still being subsidized when there is an energy crisis. | ||
| Is there a military industrial complex that's benefiting from war? | ||
| Are there pharmaceutical industries that are benefiting from medical crisis? | ||
| Right, these are all areas that you might want to locate as potential problems. | ||
| So, avert your eyes for a moment from cultural differences. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And focus on where power and financial cloud and the ability to organize is currently centralized. | ||
| And look at that. | ||
|
unidentified
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that is the area that we collectively need to address. | |
| I think you might know this guy, Russell Brand. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report here in Locals in Miami on your American tour. | ||
| Thanks for having me on the Rubin Report. | ||
| Pretty good. | ||
| We get our own mugs. | ||
| You can have that. | ||
| You want to keep that mug? | ||
| Yes, please. | ||
| I'd like to sign it and I'd like to keep it as a memento of an already lovely occasion just arriving here and meeting everyone. | ||
| It's been so lovely. | ||
| You're bouncing all over the place, man. | ||
| It's been a wacky week. | ||
| Do you have like a word that would sum up what has happened since you got to America? | ||
| The Bill Maher thing and then you've done 800 shows and all over the place. | ||
| What word would sum it up for you? | ||
| Vicissitude. | ||
| Like it's sort of like a vacillating, undulating, shape-shifting, state-altering kind of... It's been... It's interesting, isn't it, mate? | ||
| Because... | ||
| Where other than the vanguard of the political conversation would you want to be? | ||
| Where else would you want to be? | ||
| But the truth is that I don't do well with antagonism. | ||
| I don't do well with it. | ||
| I don't care for it much. | ||
| I prize serenity very highly. | ||
| I don't really particularly enjoy being at the centre of of incendiary matters, nor do I enjoy being criticized. | ||
| Say if you ask someone for feedback, this is what I mean, if you go, oh, have you got any feedback? | ||
| Do you know what I actually mean? | ||
| Can you give me a series of very sincere and specific compliments now? | ||
| That's what I mean. | ||
| Sincere and specific compliments. | ||
| The way you did that was brilliant. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Then I can sort of sit and reflect on it as if I'm like we're studying something that's objective and external. | ||
| I don't like to feel attacked in particular. | ||
| Perhaps nobody does. | ||
| Long ago, due to the nature of celebrity I have broadly elected to extract myself from the discourse about me, deciding, as is suggested in my program, what other people think of me is none of my business. | ||
| What other people think of me is none of my business. | ||
| You can do what you want in your mind. | ||
| That's yours. | ||
| Or you can even say what you want. | ||
| It's none of my business. | ||
| It's abstract. | ||
| But of course, like on the level of how I actually feel, Like all of us, I'm sure, a well-intentioned person, and I'm optimistic about human beings, and I'm trying to do something that I feel is important, and perhaps I hope I'm doing it well, but of course, with no way of knowing. | ||
| Isn't it kind of funny, like, someone that doesn't court the controversy, and then you have a moment, like that real-time moment, which actually, why don't we just throw to it real quick? | ||
| Everyone's seen it a million times, we'll throw to it. | ||
| It's disingenuous to claim that the biases that are exhibited on Fox News are any different from the biases exhibited on MSNBC. | ||
| It's difficult to suggest that these corporations operate as anything other than mouthpieces for their affiliate owners in Blackrock and Vanguard. | ||
| And unless we start to embrace, and also mate, like just spiritually, if I may use that word in your great country, We have to take responsibility for our own perspective. | ||
| I've been on that MSNBC, mate. | ||
| It was propagandist nutcrackery on there. | ||
| I went on a show called Morning Joe. | ||
| It was absurd the way they carried on. | ||
| I don't know what it was. | ||
| It wasn't morning. | ||
| There was no one called Joe there. | ||
| No one could concentrate. | ||
|
unidentified
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They didn't understand the basic tenets of journalism. | |
| No one was willing to stick up for genuine American heroes like Edward Snowden. | ||
| No one was willing to talk about Julian Assange and what he suffered trying to bring real journalism to the American people. | ||
| And I think to sit within the castle of MSNBC throwing rocks at Fox News is ludicrous. | ||
| Make MSNBC better. | ||
|
unidentified
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The moment that you give me a specific example I'd like to hear a specific example, a provable specific example of an MSNBC correspondent or anchor being on television saying something they knew was false and were saying behind the scenes to people, this is, I'm about to go out, we know, we know that the election wasn't stolen. | |
| Or something equivalent, but I will go out on television and say the opposite. | ||
| I will lie. | ||
| When's my answer? | ||
|
unidentified
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Just give me a specific example. | |
| Give me a specific example. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm with you. | |
| I think it's a false equivalency, Russell. | ||
| It's not about bias. | ||
| It's a false equivalency because you don't actually know anything about any of these organizations you're talking about. | ||
| You've been on MSNBC once. | ||
| Big fucking deal. | ||
| My darling, it was more than enough. | ||
|
unidentified
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You can't come out with... You don't have a single... | |
| Do you want an example? | ||
| Do you want an example? | ||
| The ludicrous, outrageous criticisms of Joe Rogan around ivermectin. | ||
| Deliberately referring to it as a horse medicine when they know it's an effective medicine. | ||
| What about Michael Maddow turning up on the TV saying if you take this vaccine you're not going to get it when it can be clinically trialed for transmission? | ||
| You have to listen. | ||
| Do you think you can improve America? | ||
| by determinately and avowedly condemning Fox News without acknowledging that you're participating in the same game. | ||
| Did you not just listen to Bernie Sanders, someone who plainly, legitimately believes in this country | ||
| and believes it's possible to change, but is bound by corruption, is bound by the lobbying system? | ||
| Surely it's clear to you, Bill, as one of the great pundits and experts and comic voices, | ||
| that systemic change is required. Money has to be taken out of politics. | ||
| We need new political systems that genuinely represent ordinary Americans | ||
| so that we can overcome cultural differences. | ||
| And bickering about which propagandist network is the worst is not going to save a single American life, not improve the life of a single American child, not going to improve America's standing in the world, and the world needs a strong America. | ||
| I'll tell you that. | ||
| I'll tell you that. | ||
| So you have an obligation, a duty, not to condemn these people. | ||
| You weren't being a dick. | ||
| I mean, that's the thing. | ||
| You were trying to say something very true, something that most of us are, we know about media and everything. | ||
| But then it gets turned into, like, this destruction of this guy. | ||
| And I probably even feed into some of that when I cover it on my show. | ||
| Like, man, That guy kind of deserved to get wrecked, but it wasn't really about him. | ||
| You weren't trying to make it about him. | ||
| That was very clear. | ||
| I was astonished that anybody is willing to go to the mat for that set of values anymore, but of course I know that people are. | ||
| And yeah, I don't like the idea that I'm being impolite to a person. | ||
| That's not in accordance with my values. | ||
| But you weren't really being impolite. | ||
| You were being passionate, right? | ||
| You weren't rude to him, I don't think. | ||
| I think you were You were confident in what you were saying, and it needed to be said. | ||
| Yeah, I feel we can't move forward with the conversation from, like, it happens in politics, doesn't it? | ||
| You know, when they say, oh, well, this is only happening because the last administration done that, or this is because CNN or Fox News or whatever. | ||
| It's like, well, why don't we... | ||
| Focus on what we're contributing individually, or if we claim to be the representative of some sort of movement, class, culture, or advocacy group, perhaps then we can look at how, if we claim to speak on behalf of them, and certainly I make no such claim, then we should look after ourselves and our own conduct. | ||
| And because, as Gandhi said, I find I am such a sinner in my own life, I'm not Confident when it comes to judging others. | ||
| I try to monitor my own behavior, but I am engaged in punditry. | ||
| I am engaged in commentary. | ||
| So, you know, like and as I said, I suppose in that conversation, it's not like I particularly aligned with Fox News as an institution. | ||
| In fact, I have a rather colorful history with that organization. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So when you were preparing for the show or they're telling you, you know, they obviously they do a pre-interview with you or are you past that point? | ||
| We kept trying to do it, but I kept not doing it. | ||
| I kept not doing the pre-interview. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But you knew what the topics were going to be, right? | ||
| No, I knew, like, what happened, they said that they were going to, they said that that might come up, actually. | ||
| They said, I thought that they said we would talk about the pandemic. | ||
| And then I think they said that there was a possibility that the changing nature of the relationship between Fox News and Trump would come up. | ||
| And so I suppose it was within the orbit of that topic, the contretemps, around the distinctions between neoliberal establishment media and neoconservative establishment media was discussed. | ||
| Yeah, it was so interesting because when he was trying to get you, like, give me the one, right, like he was trying to give me one time that they intentionally lied and it's like, Man, we could do this all day. | ||
| Very fine people on both sides. | ||
| Brett Kavanaugh is a serial rapist. | ||
| The Covington kids are racist. | ||
| I mean, I do this on my show every day. | ||
| You went with the Rogan one, and it's like, he just didn't have much after. | ||
| But does it get to that point of like, it's weird that anyone defends it? | ||
| Is that really what you think this is about? | ||
| I'm starting to come to that, too. | ||
| That it's hard to defend at this point. | ||
| This is where I'm at, Dave. | ||
| I'm at... | ||
| Why don't we now acknowledge that there are different ways of being a human and call a kind of truce and accept that there are some people, for the sake of simplicity, that there are progressive ways of being a human being. | ||
| There are traditional ways of being a human being. | ||
| Neither of those ways are wrong. | ||
| Why don't we allow one another to express ourselves how we want to within the obvious bounds of consent? | ||
| And then perhaps we can organize different alliances so that we can organize around the systems of centralized power that will elsewise continue to dominate and annihilate. | ||
| Do you sense that that's happening right now? | ||
| I mean, me living here in Florida? | ||
| I mean, look, you know I'm gay, I'm married, I have two kids. | ||
| Like, this is the freedom place. | ||
| You know, they make it seem like it's the place of right-wing crazy people and everything. | ||
| I'm freaking loved here and I love it right back. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| But no one cares about being gay or being married or having two kids. | ||
| No, it was freaking Halloween. | ||
| We took our kids in strollers, met every neighbor within ten square blocks. | ||
| Not one weird comment, sigh. | ||
| Nobody cares. | ||
| That's what's happening right here. | ||
| I think what you're calling for. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, but it's not happening everywhere. | |
| Do you feel that that would be able to escalate through the various expressions of like every letter of the LGBTQ plus moniker? | ||
| I mean, I personally have nothing to do with that whole thing. | ||
| Like, I happen to be gay and I'm married to a guy and that's it. | ||
| I only represent myself, as I think you probably only represent Russell Brand. | ||
| So when they try to put all these letters... | ||
| A bit of Russell Brand I represent, but there are parts of that guy that I want nothing to do with. | ||
| Who's the true representation of Russell Brand? | ||
| There are so many of us. | ||
| Goodbye Ruby Tuesday, who could put a name on you when you change with every new day? | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know that... Well, let's put it this way. | ||
| If there was a trans person walking around The town. | ||
| I don't think they would be ridiculed or anything. | ||
| I think people basically are just kind of live and let live. | ||
| Politics is making us all kind of nuts at this point. | ||
| Politics and the culture. | ||
| And I cannot see it anymore as inadvertent. | ||
| It feels to me that it must be a requirement of sustaining the systems of power that benefit, for example, in the pandemic in the obvious, observable and trackable ways financially and through the ability to surveil and introduce new regulation. | ||
| These, they must benefit from ongoing conflict. | ||
| So it's a needed piece of the puzzle. | ||
| It feels to me like it is actually. | ||
| And so my sense is that there cannot be one homogenized version of this. | ||
| There cannot be a uniculture, there cannot be a unipolar World you cannot have a new hegemonic there must be the acceptance of I would say sort of a compatible interconnected Localized systems of governance that the as much freedom as much democracy as much community as | ||
| My sense is, and again it's just a vague one, the systems of aggregation benefit people at the top of them from agriculture, through industrialization, through technology. | ||
| Whilst there are obvious benefits to agriculture to a population at large, the most significant gains are experienced at the top of those systems and the amendments that are possible are not made. | ||
| Like industrialization and even the so-called white goods revolution in this country in the 1950s. | ||
|
unidentified
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You're going to have plenty of time with your new dishwasher?" and I thought, | |
| do we have any more time? How's the technique? Are there different ways of | ||
| deploying these sets of tools or is everything subtly and unconsciously being | ||
| used in the service of a particular idea that's oddly centralizing? | ||
| Yeah, Peter Thiel always says, you know, they promised us flying cars and we got | ||
| 140 characters. | ||
| You know, in essence we've sort of stopped innovating now and we're just doom-scrolling all day long. | ||
| Remember back in our day when the internet stopped? | ||
| You'd go to a page and it would stop at the bottom? | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh yeah! | |
| Remember that? | ||
| And then they got rid of that so you just scroll forever and it never stops and you're looking for more craziness. | ||
| Yes, it's nihilistic. | ||
| I kind of sense that you're more libertarian than anything else, even though people on the right are always like, he's a lefty, but I like him. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| On the lefty, you're kind of like... | ||
| There could be a movie in that. | ||
| But I sense you're mostly, like, you're talking about decentralization, you're talking about local communities, you're talking about taking power away and that kind of stuff. | ||
| Like, you're mostly just live and let live. | ||
| I mean, the show is Stay Free, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I suppose when people talk about libertarianism, sometimes there's the sort of, is there the suggestion that we do not have a duty and obligation to love and care for one another? | ||
| I suppose I don't feel that that needs to be mandated by the end of a gun. | ||
| That people can love one another consensually and that we can organise in various different publics. | ||
| We can have the maximum amount of democracy, that we can honour the highest aspects of our nature, that, broadly speaking, I would respond sympathetically to a person suffering if I could see them. | ||
| What I'm beginning to feel is that we have There's been an aberration from the conditions of our origin. | ||
| There's nothing in our evolution that suggests that we would be able to live in societies of 300 million people, let alone 7 billion people. | ||
| Whilst that is part of the reality, that we're on a rock in infinite space, we are also in communities. | ||
| And I like that phrase that I think I heard from Helena Norberg-Hodge, act local, think global. | ||
| So like we can have as much democracy in our community as possible, | ||
| that we allow people to organise their communities however they want to, | ||
| unless it has a negative impact on another community or the individuals within that community are not happy with | ||
|
unidentified
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it. | |
| And that we have to accept that there are many different ways of being human, | ||
| traditional ways, new and emergent ways, new roles, new identities, | ||
| allow people to be who they are, allow people to have as much democracy in their schools, | ||
| as much democracy in their... | ||
| Even law and order ought to be democratic. | ||
| In my country, for example, I heard like, I respect very much people that are working services | ||
| because I understand the value of sacrifice and I have friends that are working in the police force, | ||
| thank God. | ||
| And like, I feel that wouldn't it be good if the forces of, you know, even law enforcement, it's a phrase that's, you | ||
| know, as a true anarchist libertarian that I have some issues with because who do you mandate to... | ||
| You know, because the relationship between sovereignty and the governed | ||
| is traditionally being you give us taxes, we won't get, you won't let you get killed by bandits or | ||
| whatever. | ||
| That would be the basics. | ||
| Yeah, well you know those bandits, they could get you at any time. | ||
| Give us some of your money and we'll protect you from it. | ||
| But what I feel, Dave, is that it would be nice if there were consensual policing, consensual governance, you live in the area, like it's a sort of localism. | ||
| This phrase, they're supposed Do you have, like, particular phrases and ideas that have sort of stayed in the sphere of your awareness for a long while and they start to become part of your personal philosophy? | ||
| In my case, when Gandhi said, at the point of Indian independence, this is a country of 70,000 villages, each one should be fully independent, trading only where necessary, running and governing themselves. | ||
| There's no point in us kicking out the British, then replicating the very institutions that they installed. | ||
| And it seems that we are doing this now globally. | ||
| Sets of institutionalized power, whether they're corporate or state, that don't allow ordinary people to have very much freedom. | ||
| It's interesting because you're basically, I think, selling me from an American perspective, you're selling federalism. | ||
| I mean, the idea that the states should basically do everything locally and that we should have some structure above that. | ||
| But it should probably be way weaker than this crazy structure that nobody believes in now, that is completely ineffective and probably very authoritarian. | ||
| Oh, if that's the way that you term it, then... So federalism, the idea that the states basically, as a Floridian, everything that goes on with my life, Should have to do with Florida and the laws of Florida. | ||
| The US government, the federal government, should have basically nothing to do with me except guard the borders and, you know, a couple of... make sure the states aren't at war. | ||
| A couple of things like that. | ||
| Yeah, leave everyone alone. | ||
| I suppose you're... It'd be nice for you guys to have that in the UK, huh? | ||
| What about, I suppose, look, the point of the state is obviously supposed to be in order to prevent external attack, military I mean, or gargantuan corporatism, one needs a state that can support the collective will of the people that elected them. | ||
| Now, given that for some time, and this would include both, in my view, both administrations, both political parties, they're so damn near to equal that to quarrel about which one is superior would be, I would consider, literally a waste of time. | ||
| Even now, after COVID, because I would agree with you for most of, I think we're roughly the same age, for most of our lives, yeah, but I think something shifted in COVID where it's very, very clear, like, the Republicans, they ain't great, but like, they're much less... That's the argument the Democrats make, Dave. | ||
| We ain't great, but you get this healthcare. | ||
| Oh yeah, we ain't great, but we were better in COVID. | ||
| We ain't great, fuck off. | ||
| Fuck off then. | ||
| This'll go for great. | ||
| We stayed open here. | ||
| It's why I moved here, right? | ||
| That's something. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Thanks for something. | ||
| Thanks! | ||
| I can't get hard for that conversation. | ||
| For like, oh, is it a bit better? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that really was the point when you were doing the Fox News Emerson. | ||
| That is the point. | ||
| That was the same point. | ||
| I always feel like I'm on the precipice of the Pinker conversation of, do you know that so many people have been pulled out of poverty? | ||
| And things are so great now. | ||
| Oh really? | ||
| I must be imagining all this terrible misery that I'm seeing everywhere. | ||
| All of this despair, and nihilism, and desperation. | ||
| I must be imagining it. | ||
| I must be imagining a spiritual void at the very core of our culture, because I've just seen now that you've told me that it's never been as good. | ||
| I know, like, you know, I respect Professor Jordan Leeson. | ||
|
unidentified
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Throughout history, people are like, blah blah blah, but for me that's That's not bold enough. | |
| People, this is it. | ||
| The old idea is dead. | ||
| The new ideas must emerge. | ||
| It's going to require new alliances. | ||
| It's going to require new conversations. | ||
| If we are unwilling to have them, we are going to experience new forms of authoritarianism and centralization. | ||
| It's already happening. | ||
| Both political parties have been co-opted by the same corporate forces. | ||
| They will behave in the same way. | ||
| Now, I know that in my understanding is that you have, you know, like that you, Ron DeSantis, that you're down with Ron DeSantis. | ||
| And I don't know very much about him, except I feel like I read Like about that, and like giving good deal in the leather the other day, giving good deals to the energy folks and subsidizing things. | ||
| You know, I don't feel like anybody that's operating within that system is capable of genuinely representing the will of the people. | ||
| And I'm not saying that Ron DeSantis is particularly bad, but no, and I know he's super popular here and people love him. | ||
| I would say he's particularly good here. | ||
| I know. | ||
| He's an aberration. | ||
| But I get your broader point is that if you're still operating within the system that has existed. | ||
| The system itself. | ||
| That you can't get right. | ||
| So I fully accept that. | ||
| And also, I don't think any politicians, whether it's DeSantis or if you brought back George Washington, I don't think they're gods. | ||
| They're just people, right? | ||
| So he's operating within a system. | ||
| I would say he's the best that we can get out of this system. | ||
| And he's done an awful lot here. | ||
| We have no crime. | ||
| We have no, basically, You know, no homeless people, we stayed open, we don't mandate vacs, like all the stuff that we're asking for. | ||
| All of those things sound great, but you know that there would be people from the other, like, you know, if John Oliver, when he's writing stuff, were watching you now, they would be saying, uh, excuse me, wouldn't they? | ||
| And they would, in particular, be talking about that library stuff and the school stuff. | ||
| And I watched his item the other day about, in some schools, they've banned that two dads of a penguin thing. | ||
| No, I mean the only thing, they did a thing on it today, like this is where John Oliver to me just like fails miserably, like he's making up most of that stuff. | ||
| The book, they've banned basically two books, one of them was about, what was it called guys? | ||
| Queer Theory, where they were literally, it was going to teach like third graders how to give hand jobs. | ||
| What about that Penguin one? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| Genderqueer. | ||
| But I don't think the Penguin... You're talking about the Penguin one with the two dads. | ||
| No, the Penguin one with the two dads raising a chick. | ||
| Right, so they are reviewing a few things, obviously. | ||
| And also, on the John Oliver, look, I'm not... You know what I mean? | ||
| I'm just saying, like... Yeah, I don't need to make it about him. | ||
|
unidentified
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If I didn't give you the counter-argument, what's the point in having me here? | |
| Like, what it seemed to me that they were saying is that that legislation, given that it was drafted by a lawyer, obviously, has like a sort of a looseness in it that means that it could be applied in ways that would Not be particularly permissive, excuse me, or evolved when it comes to, for example, being able to have conversations with even like a 17 year old around sort of sexuality. | ||
| And I like feel that something like, you know, like, and again, I'm basing this on just a beauty video. | ||
| Just for the record, it was for K through 3rd grade, not 17 year olds. | ||
| But he said it could be applied, because it's not specific to the language, because it would require parental consent. | ||
| I'm just passing on Oliver's research here, because I don't know. | ||
| But for me, it would seem that... | ||
| And he showed videos of this sort of testimony that was leading to the success of this. | ||
| I guess maybe it's in particular districts or particular schools. | ||
| You'll have to tell me when you watch it. | ||
| You're so much more qualified in so many ways. | ||
| But it appeared to me to be that that's the side of things where I would fall down. | ||
| I would want kids that are gay to know that it's all right to be gay. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, of course I would want that, but my personal belief is it has nothing to do with the public schools. | ||
| So that might be where you and I have a little bit of a disagreement, which I'm completely fine with, by the way. | ||
| I mean, think about it. | ||
| How old are you? | ||
| Do you say how old you are? | ||
| Nine. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm a nine-year-old little lad. | |
| I'm from Finland. | ||
| Why would you ask me that? | ||
| Why would you say that? | ||
| I'm feeling so self-conscious about dying. | ||
| What if I die? | ||
| Then what am I going to do? | ||
| No, I get your point about public schools. | ||
| I just don't think a state employee should be talking to someone else's kid about sex. | ||
| It's as simple as that. | ||
| That's my basic argument. | ||
| The counter-argument, Dave, is that in a way heterosexuality as the norm is being presented to them. | ||
| It's not like you're talking about sex, you're talking about relationships, because that Penguin book ain't talking about sex, it's talking about loving relationships. | ||
| But I also agree, because when it comes to my children, I don't want my children... Well, that's it, right? | ||
| It's funny that I'm coming because you are a gay man who's married to a man and you've got children. | ||
| Sir! | ||
| I'll tell you a thing or two about being a gay man. | ||
| Tell me about these penguins. | ||
| Well, they're gay. | ||
| You don't know much about it. | ||
| But what I want to say is that I don't like people telling me what to do at At all. | ||
| At all. | ||
| On anything. | ||
| I just want to be left alone. | ||
| I just want to be left alone and I would like to form communities on the basis of consent and people wanting to be in that community and then through bloody, tiring, exhausting, boring democracy decide how that community is evolved at the maximum level of control and when it's handed over it's always handed over consensually and in a way that's understood. | ||
| We're gonna, like, say, oh I can't be bothered to work out how to run the sewage plant. | ||
| You fuckers do it. | ||
| Oh I can't be bothered. | ||
| But when I find out That the water is owned by foreign interests and they're dumping shit into our rivers, which is happening in our country because the water authorities have been sold off when they privatised everything. | ||
| I'm not suggesting re-nationalise. | ||
| Community own their assets. | ||
| Community decide whether or not they want sewage jumped in their rivers. | ||
| Maximum amount of democracy. | ||
| Maximum amount of respect for the environment. | ||
| Maximum amount of respect. | ||
| That's what we aspire to. | ||
| And it seems that across the aisles... You're a federalist. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love it, you're a federalist. | ||
| Maximum amount of democracy. | ||
| I know you don't want labels but I mean you believe in local control and people making decisions for themselves with some limited structure. | ||
| Yes, some limited structure and always being aware of the tendency to rampant corporatism because at the moment that is what's happening and when people are claiming localism they're sort of turning a blind eye to the way that corporatism can exploit that localism if not properly undertaken. | ||
| That if there's any alliance at all it's in order to confront gargantuan Corporate power. | ||
| So as you've been on this... And get money out of politics altogether. | ||
| Should we offer that into the mix? | ||
| Isn't it funny that that was a big thing 20 years ago? | ||
| Where did that go? | ||
| And now it's just gone. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| So the politicians decided, hold on a minute, let's leave the money in politics. | ||
| Somebody's got to pay for these steaks. | ||
| You ever go out to dinner in DC? | ||
| These people are eating well. | ||
| Are they? | ||
| Of course they are. | ||
| Have you ever been to any of the big globalist things? | ||
| No. | ||
| You've never been invited to any of those? | ||
| Do you know, for some reason, Dave... Sometimes they bring in celebs. | ||
| They might have picked up that... But maybe before you were fully, you know... Yeah, no, never, actually. | ||
| Maybe, but I can't remember. | ||
| I can't remember ever going anywhere and thinking, this is reprehensible. | ||
| What was the moment that you got sort of into the politics side of this thing? | ||
| I know you're not really political in a way, but You clearly are talking about politics, but was that, I mean, you're an actor in a comic, like, was that kind of always in you? | ||
| Or was there like a moment that it happened? | ||
| Did COVID kind of escalate it? | ||
| Actor, comic, that's a type of a job, isn't it? | ||
| Like a comedian, actually, for me, is a sort of beyond a job. | ||
| That's a religion. | ||
| That's a purpose. | ||
| It's a perspective. | ||
| Actor is a type of a job. | ||
| For me, my worldview is part of my condition, it's part of where I come from, it's part of what I believe in. | ||
| Becoming an actor, that's simply just opportunism. | ||
| I was doing stand-up comedy, I got jobs on the TV as a result of that, I then got off of movies, all of these things. | ||
| Oh, these are all interesting, exciting things, and by God were they exciting for a while. | ||
| But my actual, what would we be? | ||
| Look, I sometimes think this. | ||
| If it didn't exist, would I invent it? | ||
| If it didn't like, you know, if there was no such thing as a movie industry, would I go, why don't we spend like a hundred million dollars telling this story? | ||
| And what we'll do is we'll get into trailers at four o'clock in the morning, I'll stay in there most of the time, then I'll pop out for a bit and they're like... | ||
| Do a little bit of acting? | ||
| No, what I want to do is communicate truthfully and connect people. | ||
| If anything, it's like a kind of secular and inclusive evangelism that's deeply devout and accepting of the different ways that people might find God. | ||
| That each of us are going to have our own journey to God. | ||
| That doesn't mean that people might not be part of a religious community or indeed a global faith. | ||
| But if we do not have a connection to something that I would call sublime or divine, that we are likely to become lost in materialism, individualism, nihilism and progressivism. | ||
| And by progressivism I don't mean cultural progressivism, the idea that human beings are on this journey to better and better stuff, and that doesn't seem to be happening other than, I would say, through the false markers of medicine and technology, although they are marvellous great miracles. | ||
| Is that what you're up to more than anything else? | ||
| That we're just like in this lack of truth right now? | ||
| And even to bring it back to the real-time moment, like you were trying to say something true in a culture war where nothing is true, right? | ||
| Like you do your show every day, you talk about politics and it's like a lot of it is just debunking bullshit, right? | ||
| Like the people that just shovel bullshit all day long. | ||
| Yes, that is what I'm trying to do. | ||
| I'm trying to What I feel like, mate, is that I'm limited in my understanding of most things. | ||
| In fact, the sum total of all human knowledge is negligible compared to the vast limitlessness of all potential realities. | ||
| So, there has to be a kind of blunt pragmatism to the way that we organise culture and society. | ||
| And the only reference that I can access is, how did we evolve? | ||
| Did we evolve to live in giant communities? | ||
| I can see that there are ways where living, like having broad alliances, would be hugely beneficial. | ||
| I can see that there are ways where the miracles of technology and medicine and science are hugely applicable. | ||
| Obviously, of course, I live in the world. | ||
| But it seems that there is an invisible ideology that doesn't declare and state itself explicitly and all of their even apparent cultural arguments take place within its framework. | ||
| And what I would call it is commodification, consumerism, late capitalism, corporatism, global corporatism, neoliberalism. | ||
| That this ideology isn't being openly discussed and it's at its nadir. | ||
| It's dying. | ||
| It's already dead. | ||
| It died in 2008. | ||
| And now we've got something bizarre and monstrous. | ||
| So we have like a Frankenstein trying to keep it together or something while they were rearranging chairs on the Titanic as it's sinking, something like that. | ||
| Yes, that's what I feel like. | ||
| Yes, that's what I feel like. | ||
| And I feel like if it is not Succinctly and explicitly addressed, we're going to experience new types of authoritarianism that frame themselves in, albeit apparently novel ways, that benefit hugely from arguing about the sort of stuff like even, you know, the stuff about like the public schools or whatever, when plainly, like that if you said, I want to raise my kids in this way, I'd go, okay. | ||
| I would assume that you would be the same with me. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| As long as it's not, you know, we all know what sort of abuse. | ||
| There seem to be some universal ideas that we understand. | ||
| When you're traveling, do you see places that it's working better than other places? | ||
| I mean now you've been a couple days in Florida, but you were just in Cali where it's obviously way different. | ||
| I did a stand-up show in Clearwater and I really liked it. | ||
| And what I do recognize, yes, and I do recognize that there's a sort of a deep sense of sort of like pride here and that obviously somewhat due to the stance that Florida took during the lockdown, that anti-authoritarianism is being expressed, you know, like that the governor is the anti-government Figure in your state. | ||
| I'm not pessimistic about human beings, generally speaking, but I would always just look at where is the funding coming from? | ||
| What's the ultimate intention? | ||
| What kind of alliances? | ||
| I would just ask the same questions that I would ask of anybody. | ||
| Is it as democratic as possible? | ||
| It's better than I would always reject But from both sides, as we've said, that's what I was sort of rejecting on the telly program the other day. | ||
| And I don't know Ron DeSantis. | ||
| For all I know, he could be Jesus. | ||
| But like, you know, sort of like... Pretty sure he's not Jesus. | ||
| But maybe I can get you guys to sit down for coffee. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How about that? | |
| Yeah, God, absolutely. | ||
| No, I'd like that. | ||
| I'd like that. | ||
| What I do accept is that... Dave, is that... | ||
| I feel that we want the maximum amount of authority in our own lives, like personal authority and autonomy, excuse me, and the maximum amount of democracy. | ||
| And like I told you at the beginning of this conversation, I don't really like controversy and I don't think that any of that stuff's even particularly complicated. | ||
| I'm just sort of inviting people that Identify on the right to be as discerning as I would invite people that identify on the left to be. | ||
| Like, are we definitely operating on behalf of ordinary people, totally inclusive, non-judgmental, completely loving, not secretly operating on behalf of economic interests in some, you know? | ||
| Is one of those directions easier than the other? | ||
| Like, right now, obviously, people on the right dig you, and that's, I think, probably a little weird for you in some respects, right? | ||
| Like, people that maybe a couple years ago you thought, ah, these weren't. | ||
| That's what I found. | ||
| I was a lefty my whole life, and then suddenly I started saying a few things about freedom, kind of what you're preaching here in a probably more simplistic way. | ||
| And next thing I knew, all these people that I thought were the bad guys were like, hey, you want to have dinner? | ||
| Let's see what's what. | ||
| I like how you switched mugs like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know what was in there. | |
| I have no idea what's in there. | ||
| And also it's gone from blue to red right at the conversation. | ||
| Because in a way it doesn't matter. | ||
| They're both basically the same. | ||
| That was very effective. | ||
| There's still statistics on where the funding comes from, on the number of people in Congress that own stocks and chairs in energy companies or the military-industrial complex. | ||
| It's just basically the same. | ||
| It's just basically the same. | ||
| So that's my position. | ||
| Certainly, I've found that people that I identify as being conservative or Republican or whatever have been very open to this conversation. | ||
| And look, it's clear to me And a matter of record that about 30, 40 years ago, or maybe even earlier than that, the liberal establishment became co-opted by the same financial interests that have traditionally been associated with right-wing politics. | ||
| If you look at the conditions that led to the war in Iraq and the kind of relationships and the kind of restructuring that took place in that country and the catastrophe that happened around that war. | ||
| That was Cheney and Bush and now look at what's happening elsewhere and there are sort of I would say comparable conversations that could take place and it's pretty clear where the Clinton Foundation gets money from and the way that they advocate for particular things. | ||
| So what I feel like is and The solution will not come from within that system. | ||
| I don't want to glory it by reveling in the differences because actually where I am from is a normal, modest, blue-collar, working-class background in Essex, England. | ||
| And when I see people demonised on the basis of their class or their culture, whether they are in the dominant cultural group, sexually or racially or culturally, or a smaller cultural group by those markers, If economically we are attacking people, if we're attacking a class that is economically dispossessed, then I feel like, oh, I see what's happening now. | ||
| I see what's happening. | ||
| I see why people are angry. | ||
| I see why people feel that they're being spoken down to. | ||
| They are being spoken down to. | ||
| And I suppose, Dave, that that's the thing that I felt wasn't being addressed and isn't being addressed, that the blame is being put on people that aren't empowered. | ||
| And also that there's an escalation of You know, the kind of accusations around, God, what do I want to say? | ||
| Perjuring people's beliefs. | ||
| Oh, those people are just racist. | ||
| Those people are just this or just that. | ||
| And I'm actually generally quite optimistic about people and think that people will get along if you leave them alone and if you don't impecuniate them and impoverish them. | ||
| Do you think a whole bunch of people are just going to kind of check out of the system? | ||
| Because I think a lot of people intuitively get what you're saying, and they really do want the live and let live thing. | ||
| I think there really is a feeling of that in America right now, that the whole system is so screwed up, it's so wacky, it's not in it for anyone except, you know, the few that control it. | ||
| I think a lot of people are just going to be like, all right, I'm just checking out, I'm deleting the accounts, I'm figuring out how to get off the grid, you know, and just really just kind of disappearing. | ||
| I think it's probably happening as we speak. | ||
| I wonder about that movement. | ||
| I wonder about a sort of a second kind of declaration of independence. | ||
| Like, what would happen if people did that? | ||
| Our community, we are no longer associating with the superstructure. | ||
| We want our own new confederacy. | ||
| Have you heard of that from, you know, in America? | ||
| They're talking about it now. | ||
| Texas, there's some congressman that put forward a bill to have a secession and get out, just get out of the union. | ||
| And, you know, maybe some of the red states could move out and, you know, something like that. | ||
| It seems like You know, we're united, but what are we united by? | ||
| It's hard to figure that out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wonder. | |
| Yeah, I guess that's a conversation that needs to carry on. | ||
| It needn't be presented as adversarial. | ||
| Right, that's the thing. | ||
| It comes off as adversarial, but it shouldn't. | ||
| It oughtn't. | ||
| I believe in devolution. | ||
| In our country, which is obviously an absurd term, because a country is a concept. | ||
| What is it really? | ||
| A flag? | ||
| A set of beliefs? | ||
| A group of people? | ||
| If it isn't benefiting those people, what is it doing? | ||
| That land mass across the pond. | ||
| You see that thing? | ||
| You know this language you're using? | ||
| Like, devolution was a big conversation, like, you know, a few years ago, and Scottish independence is discussed, and Wales has an assembly, and obviously because of the colonization and imperialism in Eira and the north of that country, and because Britain is an imperial and colonial power, historically, these conversations have been ongoing. | ||
| And I feel like if these institutions do not exist for the benefit of the people that they claim to serve, What is it that they are doing? | ||
| And I think you can make that, that's the type of inquiry that I don't claim to have the answer to or the conclusions to, but I feel that that ought be the investigation that takes place. | ||
| And it oughtn't be disingenuous and it wouldn't be a sort of sly way of masking corporatism or allowing people to avoid this or evade that or benefit from this. | ||
| The term that keeps occurring to me is Sartre's good faith. | ||
| Let's have good faith conversations. | ||
| Oh, look, we're different from one another. | ||
| How do you want to organise this? | ||
| How do you think that people best can behave collegiately? | ||
| What's the sort of critical mass before this gets a little complicated? | ||
| Because the tendency appears to be economically led globalism currently becoming instituted in an attempt to create a unipolar hegemony through various means and an inability to accept that there are a variety of Cultures that sort of are independently vying for their right to exist. | ||
| You ever worry we're in that dystopian future already? | ||
| Like we're too deep in it to the point where we don't even know we're in it exactly. | ||
| You know Skynet's basically been turned on. | ||
| The machine is operating and we're kind of all in the matrix. | ||
| We have these little glimmers. | ||
| I kind of think it's why your clip on Realtime took off. | ||
| It was like a little glimmer of truth amongst all of the lies. | ||
| And we see it and then we all get lost in the BS again and then You wait for another glimmer, but you sort of just never get out of the slumber, something like that. | ||
| Yeah, I do feel that. | ||
| But I also deeply believe in the possibility of awakening. | ||
| And what I haven't mentioned yet, because I guess, you know, I tend to communicate in accordance with the context that I find myself in, is that most of What I believe in is undergirded by spiritual beliefs rather than political ones. | ||
| All I know politically is just a conversational layman's knowledge. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I've not been through higher education. | ||
| I've not been to university. | ||
| I don't claim to know any more than anybody that's just watching this now. | ||
| But that's why your politics is interesting. | ||
| Because it doesn't come from politics. | ||
| It's obviously coming from something else. | ||
| That's why I think it's hitting. | ||
| It comes from a sense of like that as human beings, we know that we need meaning and purpose. | ||
| We know that we have this sort of yearning for freedom, freedom of expression, freedom to be who we really are. | ||
| We also know that there are myriad ways of being human and that there seems to be some scarce remembered time Where we could live differently. | ||
| There seems to be an awareness that we are not at the apex, but we are at the end of something. | ||
| That this could go either way. | ||
| That we could yield to more centralising authoritarianism. | ||
| Or we could look at different models. | ||
| That there may be information in the past, deep, deep in the past, arcane, anthropological information. | ||
| There may be, even in the genius of Thomas Paine and your founding fathers and all that, stuff that's of real value. | ||
| But certainly there needs to be some new principles enacted, and I think that even to move forward into that territory, we might have to offer one another the grace of a certain amount of discordance. | ||
| So what do you do if a certain amount of people don't want to offer that grace? | ||
| Because again, I'm with you, and I think a lot of people watching... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you have to take camps, I assume, right? | |
| No, but what do you do if, you know, if you sit down with the, you know, if Florida was like, hey, you know, we've just kind of had enough. | ||
| No offense. | ||
| We're just going to do our thing and take care of our people. | ||
| It's going to be very pleasant here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, let everybody live as free as they want. | ||
| But if the other guys just keep saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| We want to get involved. | ||
| We still want some of that. | ||
| We want some of the cash. | ||
| We want some of the goodness. | ||
| We want, you know, what do you do then? | ||
| I suppose then Florida would have to... Because I think a lot of people are thinking about I think the ordinary people of each of the states would have to... It has been long argued, typically I would have to say from the left, that the ordinary people of the world have more in common with one another than they have with the elites that govern. | ||
| And that this has the potential of being communicated now through the miracles that we are currently enjoying. | ||
| In his book, The Revolt of the Public, Martin Goury, the former CIA analyst, who you should have on your show if you haven't already. | ||
| No, no, I haven't. | ||
| Yeah, he's a good man. | ||
| He says that just the technology, the medium, you know, Malcolm, what am I trying to say? | ||
| Malcolm McCloud. | ||
| The medium is the message. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| That what we are experiencing now is the ability to communicate to dissent in new ways, that power is organizing differently, that you can't centralize and control in the same way. | ||
| So new forms of authoritarianism are emerging. | ||
| And we've already seen through Napster and the Arab Spring and Occupy, the potential for organization almost spontaneously. | ||
| But I would say that These are the conversations I'm having now, and the reason I'm having them is that if, like, why even, oh, you could even reject the term Florida, you could reject the term New York, you could decide how, like, I would say the maximum amount of democracy needs to be as local as possible, as local as possible, as little centralised authority as possible. | ||
| But there obviously needs to be a degree of organization. | ||
| I would say that if I would say, well, if the price of people of Florida being left alone is the people of California being left alone, if you want to use those geographical pre-existing states and that kind of terminology. | ||
| I'm just trying to bring us down to something on Earth. | ||
| I got what you're doing at the Yeah, metaphysical level, yeah. | ||
| As much democracy as possible. | ||
| As much democracy as possible, I suppose. | ||
| And again, this is not going to be immediately perfect, but which social system ever has arrived fully formed? | ||
| And also, we're not aiming entirely for perfection, we're aiming for improvement. | ||
| And the kind of reforms and incremental improvement that the current system is capable of delivering are insufficient. | ||
| So some form of radical reorganisation is required and I would say that to focus primarily | ||
| on where is power coalescing, is it observable? | ||
| Are there giant corporations that are wealthier than nations? | ||
| Well that's an interesting area to look at. | ||
| Are there powerful energy companies that are still being offered subsidies, that are still | ||
| being subsidised when there is an energy crisis? | ||
| Is there a military industrial complex that's benefiting from war? | ||
| Are there pharmaceutical industries that are benefiting from medical crisis? | ||
| These are all areas that you might want to locate as potential problems. | ||
| So avert your eyes for a moment from cultural differences and focus on where power and financial clout and the ability to organize is currently centralized and look at that. | ||
| That is the area that we collectively need to address. | ||
| This isn't the most comfortable question, but do you ever get nervous that you're hitting close to something? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Right? | ||
| And do you get nervous about just your life? | ||
| Like, you don't have to do this. | ||
| You can check out and disappear and, you know, you can meditate and jump in the ice bath and do all the stuff that you want to do forever. | ||
| But you're hitting close to something. | ||
| And that comes with risks. | ||
| Well, don't you think? | ||
| Are we not all doing the same thing? | ||
| You're not doing it? | ||
| No, I do think about that. | ||
| We are doing it. | ||
| So you're in there as well? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I do think about it. | ||
| And I think about it now more than ever because now I have two young kids. | ||
| Where before, you know, it was just me and one guy. | ||
| Now I got other issues, other people to take care of. | ||
| Or do you just not think about it because you're just doing it and that's it? | ||
| Well, sometimes I think about stuff like that. | ||
| I really believe in some things. | ||
| No, you can't stop. | ||
| That's what my answer is. | ||
| I can't stop. | ||
| I'm quite flawed and also I'm pretty, you know, I can be pretty selfish as well. | ||
| I mean, I'm a person in recovery. | ||
| That's what I am really, is a person in recovery. | ||
| Like, so I'm aware of my frailties. | ||
| I'm aware of that. | ||
| And in a way, isn't it, that, yeah, I try not to augment self-fetishization because I generate enough of that in-house. | ||
| You know, like, I find it pretty easy to get sort of excited about myself. | ||
| So I try I try to focus on, can you be of any use to other people? | ||
| And I'm aware, look, in this conversation, people are like, no, Ron DeSantis is absolutely amazing. | ||
| And maybe he is. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You live in Florida. | ||
| You're friends with him. | ||
| You know more than me. | ||
| All I'm asking is, where is there? | ||
| What are the interests? | ||
| Are people benefiting? | ||
| And the answer, when I did that show in Clearwater, people were happy, man. | ||
| They were happy. | ||
| But I told some terrific jokes, so I've got to take some of the credit for that. | ||
| How many terrific jokes have you got? | ||
| Which are actually ones that are deliverable conversationally, probably zero. | ||
| My jokes are long, long. | ||
| But there's a laugh every 20 seconds. | ||
| It's good gear. | ||
| You would have a good time, you and your husband. | ||
| Maybe don't bring the kids. | ||
| They don't speak English yet. | ||
| We'll be all right. | ||
| No way. | ||
| Well, they don't speak anything. | ||
| Oh, they're babies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're babies. | |
| I thought that he was raising them to speak Polish. | ||
| Yeah, they only speak Polish. | ||
| This is a good move. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| Polish speaking children. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why not? | |
| Doing stand-up, like, is that you at your best? | ||
| It's a fucking relief. | ||
| You're just like pure joy. | ||
| Because that's what I've always said, is that people can see, like, it's easy, like, look. | ||
| I know, like, say for the thing we've been talking about, Bill Maher, they'll extract a bit of it, they'll go, oh, Russell Brand, histrionic breakdown, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they won't go, but look it, he spoke about Bernie, like, it's like, look, Bernie Sanders is trying his best, he's talking about centralized authority, I know you don't, you're not down with Bernie Sanders, but like, you know, I think he's a person of integrity. | ||
| You were, I think, explaining Bernie's positions better than Bernie, that was the funny thing, because when they asked, when Bill asked him about equity and equality, he completely had no answer. | ||
| That's infuriated you, that, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| You hate people not to know the difference between equity and equality. | ||
| The basic shit! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like how do you say to the socialist, do you know the difference between socialism and capitalism? | |
| And he had no idea. | ||
| Like that in essence was what happened. | ||
| But you tried to kind of help him a little bit in a way. | ||
| You were a better You're a better communicator of his ideas, I think, than he is. | ||
| My hope is that Bernie Sanders is a person that is genuinely interested in decentralizing power and attacking corporatism and standing up for ordinary Americans. | ||
| Because if that isn't what you're doing, then there isn't anything else to do in politics. | ||
| There isn't any other job in politics except representing the interests of ordinary people. | ||
| Service, love, devotion. | ||
| Oh no, financial institutions have got too much power. | ||
| Oh no, there's too much lobbying money. | ||
| Oh no, this two-party system isn't working. | ||
| If you're not doing that, so I have to approach people with good faith. | ||
| So I guess I should say, yeah, let's approach Ron DeSantis and Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren. | ||
| Let's look at them all. | ||
| Let's assume they're doing their best. | ||
| And let's see what the results are. | ||
| If the results are those people are individually very wealthy and ordinary people are homeless and destitute. | ||
| They all get very rich! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh no! | |
| Isn't that weird? | ||
| They all get very rich while doing this? | ||
| Isn't that bizarre? | ||
| How did Obama get, he's got like a 30 million dollar house in Martha's Vineyard on the water. | ||
| Isn't that bizarre? | ||
| It's unfortunate. | ||
| It's unfortunate that people tend to end up accumulating money but I'm being paid also. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Also, I don't run a political party. | ||
| I don't think there should be any. | ||
| You don't just send back the cash? | ||
| You keep that, you keep that. | ||
| I'm just happy to sit in front of the sign and chat with people. | ||
| I don't sense you feel any guilt about that. | ||
| A lot of people feel guilt about their success. | ||
| And you care about other people, but I don't sense you're guilty in a way that, you know, like a lot of the lefties of Hollywood would be like, oh, you know, on one hand, they'll be super wealthy and live, you know, in the nicest house in Bel Air. | ||
| And on the other hand, they'll pretend That they're guilty about it when it clearly isn't lined up with their life? | ||
| Well, sometimes I do feel a bit guilty, actually. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| I mean, I wish that everybody lived really, really well, but as I say, I come from a pretty normal background, and for a while I was a drug addict, and I've lived on welfare for a significant portion of my life. | ||
| I don't know, in a few years when I was signing on, that's what you call it in England. | ||
| And so I do a bit think, oh God, is this right? | ||
| But then I like, because also it's for me the grandiosity, but I earned this on merit. | ||
| I do recognize that there are, you know, that there are certain revenue generating skill sets in a culture that rewards, for example, comedy or football or legal expertise. | ||
| I recognize how these things happen. | ||
| And I also don't think that moderate affluence is the real problem. | ||
| I think it's corporate gigantism. | ||
| So like, so I try not to, again, be too self-flagellating about it because that's a form of vanity as well. | ||
| Right, and for as much as you may have some cool stuff and do your thing. | ||
| I've got this now. | ||
| This jumper I bought. | ||
| You have a lovely sweater and that necklace must have been, I can only imagine. | ||
| I've had it ages. | ||
| I've had this ages. | ||
| But the point is that your level of wealth is not the wealth that you're talking about that's pulling the strings of the machine and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| If I had to set a cap, it would be the amount I have. | ||
| It would be the exact amount. | ||
| You're right there. | ||
| You're right at the precipice of being the bad guy. | ||
| After that, there's going to be some real redistribution. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you find that all the basic problems of everything we're talking about here, whether you're back home in the UK or here, that it basically is the same? | ||
| That the way we all talk about the problems now has become global? | ||
| It feels like there's some variety. | ||
| What I wonder is, I ask myself, would I be happier if I lived a life of complete service? | ||
| Would I be happier? | ||
| Is it working for me? | ||
| Are the systems working, the systems of personal gratification? | ||
| I've improved a lot. | ||
| I don't live how I used to live. | ||
| That's the question that I ask of myself. | ||
| Do things seem different in different places? | ||
| I suppose so. | ||
| But there does also seem to be a general sense that is quite global, and I don't know what it's like in Pakistan or Luxembourg, but like in the places that I go to and know, I feel like there is a hunger, an appetite, an unease, a sense of atrophy. | ||
| And most Cultures talk about ages and epochs and identifiable periods and trends, you know, and of course, perhaps there's even a narcissism to that because all of us are going to experience Armageddon. | ||
| We are all going to die. | ||
| And I do query sometimes, Dave, whether it matters. | ||
| Even in Florida? | ||
| Even in Florida, I think, especially in Florida, looking at some of the demographic, like I feel that Perhaps there's a kind of a vanity to it that, you know, does it matter if everyone dies simultaneously or not if the planet is going to ultimately expire? | ||
| But I do believe in the sanctity of human life. | ||
| I do believe in the unique beauty of our kind, of our species. | ||
| And I do believe in God. | ||
| And I do believe that we're here to realize something valuable and beautiful and that we should be aspirational in our relationships with one another. | ||
| And for me, if it isn't, as we were discussing earlier today, if it isn't based in action, Like if your experience of love and devotion and the divine doesn't have some expression in your behavior, then it's fantasy. | ||
| Do you have parts of your life that you haven't kind of put together yet? | ||
| Yeah, the whole thing really. | ||
| I'm still trying to just work it all out. | ||
| I'm still trying to work it all out. | ||
| I've recognized that when I'm sort of, I'm quite tired, you know, today. | ||
| I'm a bit worn out and I'm a bit, almost a little bit tearful, but like, I recognise that I have a facility for language that could perhaps mask the fact that I acknowledge that I don't really know what I'm doing. | ||
| I'm just asking some questions. | ||
| I don't actually think that anyone else knows what they're doing either. | ||
| That's what I've always thought when dealing with political demagogues like Boris Johnson or anybody. | ||
| No one knows. | ||
| What do you know? | ||
| What does anybody know? | ||
| I know there are, you know, like there are people that are expert plumbers and expert in construction and medicine and all of that and that there are different fields of expertise. | ||
| But all of this for me leads to the smallest possible model, smallest possible business model, smallest possible democratic models, most ability to organise your own life possible. | ||
| It's not like that life becomes abstract and your role is to sort of stare at a screen and participate only through consuming, so you don't have any role other than abstract expressions of your own outrage. | ||
| Yeah, you know the famous quote by Solzhenitsyn, in essence, I'm going to slightly butcher it. | ||
| He went through worse in them gulags. | ||
| Those gulags were rough! | ||
| But you know, basically he said, all we have to do to end this is stop participating in the lie. | ||
| And it seems like everyone basically is participating, even accidentally. | ||
| And I mean that for us, guys that are responding to stuff because it's out there and we're trying to make sense of it for people or for ourselves, and yet we still have to participate in a game that's pretty dirty. | ||
| Well, that's what I have been saying in these conversations explicitly in the case of with Joe Rogan. | ||
| And now I will say to you, perhaps it isn't enough for us to engage only in punditry or even advocacy. | ||
| Perhaps it has to become All right then, let's try and build a lot. | ||
| Well, I think that there should be communities of like subgroups of around, I don't know, is it a hundred people? | ||
| That's what chimpanzees seem to do well with. | ||
| That 2% of DNA has got to afford us something. | ||
| Maybe we can run slightly larger communities. | ||
| What are the general principles? | ||
| What is the amount of power you want to yield? | ||
| How many ways are there of organising this? | ||
| How much can we leave one another alone? | ||
| You know, perhaps, yeah, perhaps we do need to be involved in a new confederacy in the building of new systems. | ||
| That's why I built this thing. | ||
| That's why I built this thing. | ||
| I mean, I built this company. | ||
| We merged with Rumble to do exactly this at the digital level. | ||
| I haven't built my own community yet. | ||
| It would be good if you just meant this sign. | ||
| I meant this sign. | ||
| I put this together. | ||
| I built this. | ||
| It's pretty nice, right? | ||
| But this is actually... Sturdy. | ||
| Come on, that's a sturdy sign. | ||
| Very satisfying. | ||
| It's brilliant. | ||
| I really like it. | ||
| Well done. | ||
| I mean, but also it's a... But that is what you mean, right? | ||
| Like that we have to build new things. | ||
| You don't just mean physical communities. | ||
| You mean like we have to rebuild sort of everything, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's a lot of work. | ||
| I know, but maybe if we were all doing just our own little bit, then it's sort of manageable, isn't it? | ||
| I mean, again, that's another thing I get from recovery, the idea that we're all a bit mental and a bit broken, but not at the same time. | ||
| And it's nice to be able to reach out to someone and say, I'm having a bit of a, like, we can connect not at the point of our posturing, but at the point of our vulnerability. | ||
| So I actually, like, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what to do. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| It seems you're like, nah. | ||
| I had an experience once where I stopped to help a person who had had an accident. | ||
| It wasn't a serious accident. | ||
| She'd only banged her head a bit in a car in the UK. | ||
| And I was sort of helping, you know, like, because I stopped because it's, you know, a human duty. | ||
| And lots of other people stopped too. | ||
| And like, it was an interesting community that formed around that accident. | ||
| An off-duty paramedic ultimately arrived at the scene. | ||
| And I saw that in that instance, that is the person that you want in in authority, but moments later someone else might be | ||
| required to be in a position of authority. | ||
| So having intransigent systems of power that are based on the assumption that human beings | ||
| need to be marshalled compliantly into community or into behaving well, I am at odds with. | ||
| And you say libertarianism, and as I understand that, that means individual freedom, and the most freedom as an individual, whether that's the freedom to express your sexual identity consensually or the freedom to express whatever aspect of yourself that is. | ||
| And what I understand of anarchism, it's about the maximum amount of democracy and the least amount of dominion by organization happening at the level of community. | ||
| And the people that I admire, women like Helen and Norbert Codge, who for years has been advocating for, you should eat food that's grown where you are, and people should support local farming enterprises, and Vandana Shiva, who do not let industrialised agriculture take over the world. | ||
| These voices ought to be integrated, incorporated, amplified. | ||
| And these terms of left and right, I reckon we've got to let go of them. | ||
| I mean, I know that's sort of part of your narrative, your story, your life. | ||
| It's kind of fun to keep people on their toes though, right? | ||
| That's kind of in its own way, even though I don't think you're doing it by design, right? | ||
| different than I was saying when I was a kid of like I'm anti-institution and | ||
| establishment corruption and these were the things I was saying. People, I | ||
| think last time I was here, people thought I was like a Marxist-communist. Now I'm a conspiracy theorist. I'm | ||
| saying the same thing. | ||
| It's kind of fun to keep people on their toes though, right? | ||
| Like that's kind of in its own way even though I don't think you're doing it by design, right? | ||
| Next time I'll come back as a vampire. I'm a vampire now! | ||
| I'm Pinocchio! | ||
| Then you'll have a serious political movement behind you. | ||
| I could see that. | ||
| What else is on your mind that you're not doing publicly? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| You're just like a canvas out there. | ||
| No. | ||
| The focus of my life is my wife, and my children, and my meditation, and my recovery, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and just trying out Hold together the ability to do what, you know, like our jobs now of like broadcasting five days a week on Rumble and creating that content and trying to manage these complex arguments that can easily become divisive and incendiary. | ||
| Yeah, it ain't easy. | ||
| It ain't easy, Dave. | ||
| Mate, is it an hour yet? | ||
| Because I feel like I really need a wee quite bad. | ||
| You got a wee? | ||
| I think a wee moment, I think... Ain't that been an hour? | ||
| How long has this been since I've started talking? | ||
| Yeah, it's been about an hour, I think. | ||
| Yeah, can I stop talking? | ||
| Because I'm tired, I'm so tired. | ||
| I've never ended an interview with someone having to go to the bathroom, but I feel that that's appropriate for this. | ||
| Is it alright? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is there anything else you want to talk about in terms of your bodily functions? | ||
| I've got a stand-up show at Locals! | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Oh, I meant just the personal side. | ||
| No, my bodily functions are also quite good. | ||
| A general sense of weariness and fatigue, but also optimism about your country and the potential of conversations such as the ones we're having to lead to new forms of alliance and an optimistic approach to politics and culture. | ||
| Can I just say one thing before I let you pee and then I promise you can leave? | ||
| What if I just go? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, just... I guess if you got up it would be a very... Just relax! | |
| But I promise you it's a nice thing which is that for me doing this whole thing and talking about politics the way I do and the culture wars and all of this stuff and that I somehow decided to create a company that then merged with the other company and that one of the guys on the short list of people that I think is making sense in the world is sitting in the room with me doing this right now and all that. | ||
| Like, that's the thing. | ||
| That's the other thing. | ||
| That's the subtext. | ||
| Between the other political thing. | ||
| You're giving me that look that I know means you got it. | ||
| So I think we're good. | ||
| You're lovely, Dave. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| If you're looking for more uncensored opinions from today's thought leaders, check out our media playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a wide variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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