Nov. 12, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
20:18
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I'll give you the bad news and then I'll give you the good news. | ||
| The bad news is that actually every institution is so thoroughly infused with insanity, you know, and our political structures in the U.S. | ||
| are just so deeply corrupt. | ||
| I mean, it is fundamentally a racket. | ||
| That they also are more or less unrescuable. | ||
| Now in the case of the U.S. | ||
| structure, we have a constitution that's quite good, and in fact it is constantly now being targeted by people who understand that it is an obstacle to what they want to accomplish in terms of power. | ||
| But that said, both our parties are so deeply corrupt that they, I believe, are both unrescuable. | ||
| And the same can be said of our newspapers, of the entire tech industry. | ||
| You know, you have started a competitor to the major platforms and you're doing very well and you've done a | ||
| great job of protecting speech so that's a beautiful thing but you're still a small player | ||
| and the big players you know including unfortunately X which is a mystery I would love to see | ||
| solved but nonetheless all of the institutions frankly of the west are in free fall that's | ||
|
unidentified
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the bad news. Brett Weinstein. | |
| Hello. | ||
| Dave Rubin. | ||
| Very good to be here with you. | ||
| I did not know we would be seeing each other in London, but we're doing apparently a big Rubin Report January reunion show over the last couple of days. | ||
| There's something I think deeply interesting about what put you on the map at Evergreen, | ||
| which everyone knows about, and the protests and the threats of violence, and now that | ||
| you and your wife Heather no longer have jobs there after dealing with the mob, and what | ||
| we're seeing sort of burst across academia all over the West right now. | ||
| I suppose you are not that surprised. | ||
| No, in fact, I rather... | ||
| How is that to tee you up? | ||
| Heather famously said that this was going to spill out into the world and that it really | ||
| was not about free speech and it was only tangentially about college campuses and that | ||
| it would eventually infect everything, which it is doing. | ||
| And it's a pity that it had to get to that stage for people to realize that that was inevitable. | ||
| But I guess we're here now, and maybe there is still time to rescue something. | ||
| Do you think there's a time to rescue something? | ||
| Well, why don't we do the academic level first before we get to sort of the political portion of it, which is what's happening here. | ||
| Yeah, no, you can't rescue the Academy. | ||
| It's unrescuable, and the reason that it's unrescuable is that the toxic intellectual environment has been so aggressive for so long that there aren't enough people left in the Academy who know how to do the job properly, right? | ||
| The number of people Most of those who did know how to do the job properly either realized that academia wasn't the place to do it, and they never completed their degrees, or they were driven out. | ||
| And the people who are there are largely there because of an epidemic of cowardice that has allowed them to dodge the the ire of the revolutionaries. | ||
| But do you really want, you know, a faculty full of cowards who can't manage to resist insane ideas like Two plus two might not equal four, or pedophilia might be a concept that we have to reinvestigate, or that, you know, science has discovered that men can become women. | ||
| All of these things were insane from the get-go, so you've got a faculty who, even if they privately know better, won't say so. | ||
| Those people are not in a position to staff a university that works. | ||
| I asked you this the first time we ever sat down. | ||
| When did the whole Evergreen thing blow up? | ||
| Roughly 9.30 in the morning, May 23, 2017. | ||
| That's when it began. | ||
| Well, roughly 930 in the morning, May 23rd, 2017. | ||
| Roughly. Okay, so I had you on, I think you were the first, I was the first interview you did, so it was probably about | ||
| maybe four or five days after that. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| One of the things that I ask you, and I wonder if your perspective has changed a little bit, is do you think that | ||
| even you and Heather should have seen it first? | ||
| I mean, you guys were at a wildly, I think Evergreen was considered arguably the most lefty college in America or the second most lefty. | ||
| Obviously, Pacific Northwest, Portland, Seattle, Washington, etc. | ||
| Do you think that you guys should have seen it first or done something earlier, out of the arms earlier? | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| And actually, I was just thinking about it yesterday. | ||
| A, we did see it. | ||
| In fact, Heather and I have known each other since high school. | ||
| We graduated from UCSC together, and we saw the parent generation of this insanity during our stint as college students, and we did fight back. | ||
| So we've been fighting it for a long time. | ||
| I don't think that there is anything obvious we could have done, and we fought it on our own campus at Evergreen. | ||
| In fact, What the public does not know is that 9.30 in the morning, May 23, 2017, turns out to have been chosen by the faculty who put the students who streamed into my classroom and accused me of racism, students I should point out that I had never met, | ||
| The faculty who put them up to it chose that day because it was the one-year anniversary of my standing up in a faculty meeting where there were no students present and fighting as the only voice who spoke against a particular initiative in which faculty were going to be forced on an official document to chronicle their own racism annually. | ||
| So, we did fight back. | ||
| On the other hand, there is a degree to which after Heather and I got ejected from the Academy, there was still a degree of... it took time to actually see the world with full clarity on the outside. | ||
| I would imagine that if you are a spy who adopts the language of whoever it is you're spying on and lives amongst them so that you can collect information there's also an inevitable picking up of belief structures or ways of seeing the world and when you find yourself back home it must take some time to regain your full faculties and I think There is a degree of that. | ||
| Some of what was going on around us we didn't see, and some of it we saw very, very clearly, but it's impossible when you're embedded at that level to be perfectly clear-headed. | ||
| So if you believe that the academic layer has just sort of disintegrated, what do you think about the political layer? | ||
| I mean, that's not fully what ARK is about. | ||
| ARK's really trying to figure out what the story is so that we can get it across disciplines to fix some of this stuff. | ||
| But like, politically, what do you think is supposed to happen? | ||
| Well, look, I'll give you the bad news and then I'll give you the good news. | ||
| The bad news is that actually every institution is so thoroughly infused with insanity, you know, and our political structures in the U.S. | ||
| are just so deeply corrupt. | ||
| I mean, it is fundamentally a racket. | ||
| That they also are more or less unrescuable. | ||
| Now in the case of the U.S. | ||
| structure, we have a constitution that's quite good, and in fact it is constantly now being targeted by people who understand that it is an obstacle to what they want to accomplish in terms of power. | ||
| But that said, both our parties are so deeply corrupt that they, I believe, are both unrescuable. | ||
| And the same can be said of our newspapers, of the entire tech industry. | ||
| You have started a competitor to the major platforms and you're doing very well and you've done a great job of protecting speech so that's a beautiful thing but you're still a small player yeah and the big players you know including unfortunately X yeah which is a mystery I would love to see solved but nonetheless all of the institutions frankly of the West are in free fall | ||
| That's the bad news, right? | ||
| I don't think that they are rescuable, you know, and maybe even X is the demonstration of this, because I think Elon actually did want to rescue it, and it's proving to be difficult. | ||
| Extremely, and he's admitting it to some extent, and I also think the guy's trying to send us to Mars, and maybe he's spread a little thin on some of this stuff. | ||
| Yeah, there is, there is, yeah. | ||
| But, so that's the bad news, is all of our institutions are fatally compromised, and I'm not even sure I'm increasingly wondering whether or not rescuing them is the right metaphor. | ||
| But the good news is that the force that I call Goliath has taken Almost every single player that you could want on your team and shoved them out of whatever institution they were in and pissed them off in the process. | ||
| So effectively, Goliath has created the dream team that you would want to gather if you wanted to fight Goliath. | ||
| Well, that's why these three days have been so special to me. | ||
| Personally, it's like all of these people who I came to know over all these years for all these different reasons, right? | ||
| The fact that you just showed up at my doorstep one day after going through what you went through, and it's like, we're all here now, so maybe? | ||
| Well, it's time. | ||
| I mean, it's actually frankly late, but it's not too late as far as I know. | ||
| So I do hope that the proper thing gathers. | ||
| I'm a little concerned. | ||
| I'll just be frank with you. | ||
| Conservatives are right about an awful lot these days. | ||
| We have thrown out so many babies with the bathwater, and obviously that has traveled on a carrier wave of at least nominal progressivism, that the conservatives are now seeing how right they were and they're feeling vindicated, and I get it. | ||
| That said, you cannot conserve your way out of our predicament. | ||
| That we are actually in a new place, and our dysfunctions are actually in part a measure of the fragility of the structure that we had. | ||
| So if we're going to get out of this, we can't just It can't just be conservative. | ||
| You need to build new things and conserve old things. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which ironically is also a liberal concept to some extent. | ||
| And this is the thing. | ||
| And if you actually were to go back and look at all of the places where Jordan Peterson and I have interacted, this has been a constant refrain between us. | ||
| And he's been great on it. | ||
| I keep saying, look... It's what he represents to me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The tension between these things is what makes it work. | ||
| The tension between the liberals' desire to solve problems and the conservatives' desire to prevent us from doing stupid things that bring about, you know, new dysfunctions that we didn't even see coming. | ||
| Can you give me a biological example of what's happening right now? | ||
| Like, is there a way to look at an organism that has gone through sort of like the systemic failure that you're talking about that ends up surviving? | ||
| I'm sure we can give you a lot that, you know, the systems fail and then the animal dies. | ||
|
unidentified
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Is there something sort of evolutionary that kind of works here? | |
| Yes, but it isn't what you're asking for. | ||
| It's not like, you know, it's not like I can point to sea otters and, you know, use them as an example. | ||
| The example is people. | ||
| So let me just lay out the sort of brief model. | ||
| And this is, for people who want to dive deeper, this is in the book that Heather and I wrote, The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. | ||
| Human beings are different than any other species that has ever existed. | ||
| We have a specialty and our specialty is having no specialty. | ||
| And the way we do that, we get the advantages of a specialist species and the advantages of a generalist. | ||
| What's happened is that our genomes have offloaded the work of evolution, the adaptive capacity, to our cultural minds. | ||
| Or to our systems, basically, right? | ||
| It's really the genome backed its own control off and handed over the job of adaptation to our cultural layer. | ||
| And because culture can move horizontally, it evolves at a rate that is many, many orders of magnitude faster. | ||
| So it can adapt to novelty, whereas your genes would take forever to confront new problems. | ||
| So that's great. | ||
| And what it means is that whereas most species have a niche, Human beings can have niche after niche. | ||
| We switch niches as part of our mechanism for being people. | ||
| Now the way we do that is that when our ancestors' wisdom is functional, which is most of the time in history, we just apply it. | ||
| And that's the cultural packages we are handed, the religious doctrines that we have, the principles that our grandparents told us. | ||
| When the ancestral wisdom fails, when it's inadequate either because you've moved somewhere that they didn't know anything about or because something has changed, What we do is we move into consciousness. | ||
| Consciousness is our tool for dealing with novelty. | ||
| And so what people misunderstand about consciousness is they think consciousness is fundamentally the thing that we all experience in our own minds, our awareness. | ||
| That's secondary. | ||
| The primary function of consciousness is what we're doing right now. | ||
| It's the thing that humans uniquely do. | ||
| It is the sine qua non of humans. | ||
| It is the ability to transmit abstractions between minds and then parallel process them and then come back together with something that is greater. | ||
| The sum is greater, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. | ||
| That capacity is what we're supposed to do when our ancestral wisdom is inadequate. | ||
| So now think about the description that you just gave of where we are and the tension that you and I both feel about the sort of conservative view and the need to add something liberal in order to actually mature into a new story that actually is better. | ||
| Well, that's what we're supposed to be doing. | ||
| We are supposed to be gathering and figuring out what part of the ancestral wisdom still applies, which part of it is out of date, what we haven't discovered yet that needs to be brought in. | ||
| We would write stories and then evolution would turn them into myths, myths that become transmissible. | ||
| And then, hopefully, two generations from now, three generations from now, Those people would have a cultural package that did work because we, their ancestors, had built it together and put it into the cultural layer where it can be transmitted efficiently to them. | ||
| That's what we should be doing at this moment because that's what human beings do when the ancestral wisdom has failed, which is exactly where we are. | ||
| I'm just reminded how good it is to sit with you in person instead of when we've been doing this on Skype lately because there's a million other places I want to go right now, so we're going to do this again in Miami. | ||
| And you are doing some stuff with DeSantis on the COVID front, so we'll get you to Florida to do it properly. | ||
| But let me just ask you one other thing. | ||
| So all of that being said, does it strike you that what is happening right now was inevitable? | ||
| Meaning even if I don't mean about you and Heather, but if all of us had done everything we could have done, that no matter what, the system as it was constructed was going to get us to this point, so that maybe we could have that evolutionary sort of reset or re-beginning. | ||
| The full answer to that is going to take two hours at some point, but let me give you the brief answer. | ||
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unidentified
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Give me the brief answer so we can then use it as the setup for the next one. | |
| Part of this was inevitable and part of it I've been predicting since I was a college student and it's really dire if you understand what it is and why it was inevitable. | ||
| The West is the most beautiful invention that humans have come up with because it allows us to take our genetic drive to exclude others who don't share our genes And it replaces it with a better fundamental reason for a civilization, and that is the creation of wealth by collaborating. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| If you put aside somebody's genetic relatedness to you, then you have a great range of people to collaborate with, and who knows what two or three or ten individuals might come up with that we haven't had yet. | ||
| So it generates wealth like crazy, which is why the West has been so contagious, because once you see how dynamic and productive it is, you want to join. | ||
| Problem is, That system, the West, the agreement to put aside genetic lineage, is fairer, it is safer, it is less violent, it gives greater chance to pursue meaning, beauty, compassion, all the things that we want to see in the world. | ||
| It's fragile. | ||
| And the problem is that when the growth runs out, when you stop being able to generate growth because the next frontier is not obvious, it breaks down into the prior order, which is lineage versus lineage violence, essentially. | ||
| What you're seeing in the Middle East is that outbreak, which was inevitable. | ||
| But the problem is, because the world has now run out of the mechanisms for generating growth, or even pretending that there is growth, The whole world is going to... the West is falling apart in front of our eyes, as predicted. | ||
| Right, it's interesting. | ||
| So basically what we're saying is if we had new places to explore, even on planet Earth, that might be an avenue for it, right? | ||
| Or maybe we have to be... this would be an Elon version... we have to be off-planet. | ||
| If we just had other avenues to do some of the stuff that humans are kind of set up to do, that may be some of... but we're sort of at the end of the road in some respects. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I'll just put it in very intuitive terms. | ||
| If you think about it, if you are in a place where there is a growth potential, then you've got to be a total dick to go after people because of the shape of their nose or the color of their skin, right? | ||
| Why go after people when you can just bring stuff into the world and make wealth out of it? | ||
| But when there's no opportunity to do that, the natural thing is to figure out, you know, it's musical chairs, and suddenly the music has stopped, and you know, it's not that there's one chair too few, it's like 30% of us are not going to be around, so who can I collaborate with to make sure we get chairs? | ||
| And blood is thicker than water. | ||
| That's why this is happening. | ||
| If you don't want to see a massive wave of antisemitism, which of course we are already seeing as predicted, if you don't want to see the world descend into these factions in which they go after each other because the music has stopped and it's time to team up based on genes, what you need to do at this point, I don't even think we can rescue the West, what you have to do is rekindle it, you know, the way the ancients might carry an ember in a sack so that when they got to a new place they could start a fire without having to break out the bow drill. | ||
| We need to rekindle the West from that which remembers what it was, and we need to buttress it so that it's actually capable of not running out its own growth opportunities. | ||
| And if we don't do that, I'm afraid that it's not even that we're being returned to this awful phase of history from which we came. | ||
| We can't do that with the weapons we have. | ||
| It won't last. | ||
| Right, so the real point is, look, and I don't like saying this, I don't like being an us and them kind of guy, but unfortunately the logic takes me there, it forces me to it. | ||
| This is us versus them, and us is anybody who gets why the West is the answer to this puzzle, and anybody who doesn't get it, I don't care what flag they're waving, those are the people that we either have to bring on board or figure out how to deal with their opposition, | ||
| because they're in a position to kill off this experiment. | ||
| And by this experiment, I mean the human experiment. | ||
| I normally try to end interviews on a positive note, but since we agreed that this is just the prelude to a | ||
| longer thing, great to see you, my man. | ||
| Great seeing you. | ||
|
unidentified
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If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics | |
| instead of nonstop screaming, check out our politics playlist. | ||
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