Nov. 17, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
24:59
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| We had a campaign, National Progress Alliance, with the Executive Director, months and months before any of this stuff happened. | ||
|
unidentified
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This should be the easiest ask on planet Earth. | |
| Give it to Humane Society, give it to Dave Rubin, give it to my non-father, give it to... I don't need it. | ||
| Give it to anybody, but don't give it to a university. | ||
| Because when you give it to a university, you're supporting an indoctrination mill. | ||
| You're supporting something You're supporting an institution whose very values are antithetical to Western liberal democracy. | ||
| So you have to stop. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right, Peter B., we are here. | |
| I'm not even going to say your full name. | ||
| You're Peter B. You've appeared on this show so many times. | ||
| You don't need a last name. | ||
| Who needs a last name? | ||
|
unidentified
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I know. | |
| We've had conversations over many years. | ||
| Before we did anything else. | ||
| You are half the man you used to be. | ||
| I am. | ||
| You got off with dairy. | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| You lost like 30 pounds or something. | ||
| Well, that's the crazy thing. | ||
| As I mentioned, the only change I made, literally the only change, was I took dairy out of my diet. | ||
| I mean, I could show you, but it's a little crude. | ||
| It's a family show. | ||
| I could show you my pant loops, but the other thing is I kept every variable the same, so I scienced it. | ||
| So I know that it had to be dairy, and I feel great with the weight off. | ||
| Beyond dairy and diets, which are very important. | ||
|
unidentified
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Indeed. | |
| We have about 20 minutes here. | ||
| We're at this art conference and what we are trying to do, what Jordan is trying to do, is tell a better story so that the West can save itself. | ||
| You've been one of the guys out there At college campuses, I mean this is basically what you do for a living now, trying to show people that maybe they don't necessarily know why they believe what they believe, what they might be confused about. | ||
| Do you view that as kind of the first step before we get to the course correction, is kind of pulling some of the strings on what's wrong with people's thinking? | ||
| I view it as a critical step. | ||
| I don't know if it's the first step. | ||
| I think that the first step is that our institutions are so corrupt right now. | ||
| It's not just that our institutions are corrupt and our legacy institutions are corrupt, but it's that we know that the wellspring of this is from academia. | ||
| I mean, we know that. | ||
| In fact, James Lindsay is in there. | ||
| 2015, we identified the problem. | ||
| 2017, we published the conceptual blank. | ||
| You can say penis. | ||
| We'll link to that interview that I did with you guys about that. | ||
| 2018, we decided to do something about it. | ||
|
unidentified
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this on your team. Okay, okay. You know, we'll link to that interview that I did with you | |
| guys about that. Okay. Yeah, 2018 we decided to do something about it. Everyone thought | ||
| we were crazy, like truly nutso. You know, the trajectory, it's not happening. | ||
| It's only fringe people in fringe departments. | ||
| It's only fringe departments. | ||
| It's only humanities. | ||
| It's only universities. | ||
| It will never spill out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here we are. | |
| It continues to get worse. | ||
| Although now I think we're seeing a balance. | ||
| But once we The two paths to ideological capture of the institutions. | ||
| You build new institutions, or you try to reform institutions. | ||
| And DeSantis is doing a fantastic job at reform. | ||
| I'll be very blunt with you. | ||
| I don't think it's going to succeed, but I completely 100% support the mission. | ||
| You don't think it's going to succeed? | ||
| You're meaning succeed at a national level? | ||
| At a national level, yeah. | ||
| Well, that might be Right. | ||
| I think at the Florida level it seems like it's working. | ||
| Well, Rufo's doing a fantastic job at New College. | ||
| We went to New College. | ||
| But back to your original question. | ||
| We can talk about that. | ||
| Back to your original question. | ||
| You live in an echo chamber. | ||
| Not you, but college campuses are echo chambers. | ||
| Students not only don't hear the other side of the issue, but they think they're better people because they don't. | ||
| So it's an indoctrination mill, a factory, a social justice factory. | ||
| And so Reid and I go around, not just the United States, but the world, and we do Spectrum Street epistemology. | ||
| We put mad, strongly disagree, disagree, slightly disagree, neutral on the other side. | ||
| And we ask people targeted questions to see if the confidence in their belief is warranted. | ||
| And invariably, as you can see from literally, I don't even know how many videos now, it's not the case. | ||
| I suppose it doesn't surprise you at this point in your career that the people who seem more open to discussing these things tend to lean a little more conservative? | ||
| Yeah, I'm glad you didn't say to the right. | ||
| These terms are all becoming... Here's the other thing I found is that invariably people in the United States, when you ask college kids and you can see this all the videos they're looking for | ||
| reasons to be offended they're looking to be upset but when we do this here you don't you | ||
| don't see that you don't it's the feel is different the tenor is different and you know we've done | ||
| is really palestinian problem we've done virtually every transgressive problem one can think of | ||
| But this idea that I'm a good person because I'm offended by this, because I don't even know I've been indoctrinated by my institution. | ||
| It's a serious problem. | ||
| You've been so in on this, not because of just what you do publicly now, but you were at Portland State. | ||
| You were teaching ethics or philosophy? | ||
| Philosophy and ethics, critical thinking, reasoning. | ||
| One of the first One of the first public gigs that I ever did was you invited me up there with Christina Hopps. | ||
| Yeah, we had a great time. | ||
| And it was the three of us, but the amount of security. | ||
| It was the first time just telling the people with the shields we had to go into the womb. | ||
| And we were with Christina, who I remember she had the daintiest little wrist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I remember thinking they were screaming that we were Nazis and all this stuff. | ||
| And how this woman couldn't, you know, she's like the softest woman you could possibly imagine. | ||
| They're calling me a homophobe and you're a Nazi. | ||
| Andy Ngo was just in here, and Andy Ngo at that time was a student there, and now he's obviously become a huge voice in all of this. | ||
| But I mention that because it's like, you were on the academic side, now you're on the other side, but you left. | ||
| I had to leave. | ||
| That's something. | ||
| You put your mind where your mouth is. | ||
| I had to leave. | ||
| Look, just imagine what we were doing to students. | ||
| We were telling them they were getting an education, we were doing them a disservice. | ||
| They weren't getting an education. | ||
| They thought they were being educated, you know, educated to lead out of. | ||
| They weren't getting that. | ||
| And anyone who stayed in that system basically perpetuated an injustice. | ||
| And almost, it was almost criminal what we were doing to those kids. | ||
| So Portland State was the nucleation point before the mass explosion, like the most easy to see in Portland, at Portland State. | ||
| And all the derangements, everything, defund the police, abolish prisons, all the total craziness. | ||
| By the way, Portland's murder rate has shot up. | ||
| The police force is down to an all-time low. | ||
| I think there's only one traffic cop in the whole city, so you drive around, people do donuts in the street. | ||
| I mean, there are necessary consequences to public policies. | ||
| So what is the better story? | ||
| That's the other question I'm asking everybody here, since that's the whole idea of the comments. | ||
| What is the better story? | ||
|
unidentified
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Other than, okay, you know, let's respect each other. | |
| No, that's bullshit. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Sorry about that. | ||
|
unidentified
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I feel comfortable with our own demonetized public events. | |
| Well, one of the things, I've come to figure out what that is, but I have my own answer to the question, but I genuinely want to listen to hear what other people have to say. | ||
| Here's my answer. | ||
| That's the beauty of this, by the way. | ||
| Everyone's presenting their own argument for this. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't think anyone's coming here and saying it's my way or the highway. | |
| Yeah, well, I'm going to find out. | ||
| I'm going to find out. | ||
| That's why I'm here. | ||
| Here's my answer to that. | ||
| Western values worth defending. | ||
| Freedom is worth defending. | ||
| Enlightenment values. | ||
| Freedom of the press. | ||
| Freedom of association. | ||
| Freedom of speech. | ||
| I don't want another echo chamber. | ||
| I don't want to be in a place where if I give a secular blasphemy a secular blasphemy or say something heretical. | ||
| I want to hear I mean, there are clear incitements to murder, right? | ||
| in a debate. I want to hear, you know, there are people who are screaming, gas the Jews now, in | ||
| Australia. I don't know if you've seen that. It was on the radios. I mean, there are clear | ||
| incitements to murder, right? And so it's shifted from any kind of public policies to attack on | ||
| people for who they are. I think that we have strayed so far from thinking about what's worth | ||
| defending and what's worth valuing that we are reverting to kind of this pre-medieval tribalism. | ||
| And I'm going to go ahead and close out the meeting. | ||
| And my hope for this, you didn't ask what my hope is, but my hope is that we move beyond cliches and platitudes. | ||
| We move beyond, if I hear one more person, I want peace, I want justice. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Every, great, fine. | ||
| By the way, when certain people say justice, they don't mean, they don't traffic in the term in the way that sane people traffic in that term. | ||
| But I want to My hope for this is that we have tangibles, deliverables that are actionable, that we can achieve some kind of a consensus on. | ||
| It doesn't have to be a universal consensus, but we can agree that this is how we move forward. | ||
| And my other hope for this conference is that dissident voices are not just allowed but fostered. | ||
| So what do you think we do about this new confluence between the Marxists and the Progressives, who we've all been kind of exposing for quite some time, and now they're new allies with the Islamists, let's say, because, you know, you mentioned what happened at Sydney Opera House where they were chanting, that's the genes. | ||
| Now you can have some, I suppose, you can have some sort of intellectual argument about whether that is free speech or not, and obviously they don't have the First Amendment in Australia like we do in the States. | ||
| But basically that they're weaponizing all of the freedoms of the West now against itself. | ||
| What do we do with that as free speech guys? | ||
| Okay, so that's the question of the hour. | ||
| If the criticism is all of the people who are suddenly pro-free speech are against people | ||
| yelling gas to Jews, which a lot of us are getting crap for even saying. | ||
| So the first thing is you need to have a conversation about what the framework is, right? | ||
| If one is a free speech absolutist, if one makes that claim, then you have to allow for | ||
| gas in the Jews, right? | ||
| You have to allow for people to, not gas in the Jews, but claiming that, shouting or screaming gas in the Jews. | ||
| Although I would say that's as close as you can possibly get for a direct call to incitement, right? | ||
| But even if it is incitement, if you are truly a free speech absolutist, then anything goes. | ||
| You have to allow anything. | ||
| Right, although I guess with the First Amendment doesn't allow for, not I guess, the First Amendment doesn't allow for direct calls to violence. | ||
| Right, so that's the question. | ||
|
unidentified
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So this is the, that's what I'm asking you, like what do we do about Well, that's the question. | |
| The question is, you have two things. | ||
| You have what the law allows and what should the law allow. | ||
| And should that be the law in the first place? | ||
| And unfortunately, our educational infrastructure is so damaged, we're utterly incapable of having that conversation. | ||
| Utterly incapable. | ||
| People are talking about my former institution where I used to work. | ||
| They're even against the idea that people can make a reasoned Yeah. | ||
| criticism of critical theory because they're claiming that that is racist. | ||
| In and of itself. | ||
| In and of itself. | ||
| So think about how far removed that is from the direct incitement of violence. | ||
| And just, I don't have to tell you, you know this, the same people who are screaming about | ||
| trigger warnings and microaggressions have no problem with gas, the Jews killed the Jews, | ||
| now all of a sudden they're free speech. | ||
| They're free speech, the president of Harvard is claiming free speech, you saw it happen | ||
| at NYU, you know, I mean, this is such monumental hypocrisy. | ||
| But going back to your question, what should we do? | ||
| Yeah, what do we do? | ||
| The first order of business. | ||
| and we'll see you next time. | ||
| If a stream is being polluted, you have to stop the pollution at the source. | ||
| The wrong way to think about it is, let's clean up the stream. | ||
| The right way to think about it is, let's stop polluting the stream. | ||
| You have to stop donating to your alma mater. | ||
| First order of business. | ||
| And we're seeing some of that now. | ||
| We are. | ||
| And we had a campaign, National Progress Alliance Executive Director, months and months before any of this stuff happened. | ||
|
unidentified
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This should be the easiest ask on planet Earth. | |
| Give it to Humane Society. | ||
| Give it to Dave Rubin. | ||
| Give it to my non-father. | ||
| Give it to anybody, but don't give it to a university. | ||
| Because when you give it to a university, you're supporting an indoctrination mill. | ||
| You're supporting an institution whose very values are antithetical to Western liberal democracy. | ||
| So you have to stop. | ||
| Now, for all those people who don't donate anyway, or who've already stopped, now we have to talk about what else we can do to move the needle. | ||
| Show up. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| Everybody wants to do things virtually. | ||
| If you look at the meetings, videos of me, there are only a few people who show up, and they're all the same. | ||
| They're just these far, far left, radical, intersectional, critical social justice maniacs. | ||
| Show up. | ||
| Be a voice on the other side. | ||
| Physically walk into your school board meetings, etc. | ||
| Now we're seeing more people do that. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's great. | |
| So that sends a clear message. | ||
| Vote. | ||
| That's another one. | ||
| Look at a candidate's policies. | ||
| Ask questions. | ||
| Record things. | ||
| The gold standard is to do this legally, right? | ||
| So you have to check if you're a one-party state. | ||
| Get it on film. | ||
| Upload it to YouTube. | ||
| Inform people what the problem is. | ||
| So here's another thing. | ||
| Be forthright in your speech. | ||
| Be honest with people. | ||
| And if someone has a disagreement with you, You can let friends be wrong. | ||
| You don't have to have perfect ideological congruity and everything. | ||
| You don't have to believe exactly the same thing. | ||
| Are we still at dinner tonight? | ||
| It's shocking. | ||
| Our dinner keeps growing tonight. | ||
| But that's a thing because we've lost friendships. | ||
| What do we, do you sense that the silver lining maybe is that now that we see it so radically, it was one thing when they were like, okay, America is systemically racist and people are just like, all right, fine. | ||
| Where now it's like literally like gas the Jews or these people deserve to die. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think that maybe they've pushed far enough now that, that the pushback for the average checked out person is now going to appear? | ||
| Let's say the liberal who is just like, ah, whatever. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I see schisms in this. | ||
| I don't know how to answer that. | ||
| I can't prognosticate another principle. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I do think that there is a kind of vicious anti-Semitism that cloaks itself in anti-Zionism. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I do think that people now just simply don't have the tools to navigate difficult problems. | ||
| I think it's even worse now. | ||
| It's worse now, I think, than it's been certainly in my lifetime. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| I do think there are ways forward. | ||
| If you read Lincoln's second inaugural address, he talks about friendship and the need for a kind of reconciliation. | ||
| The very idea that we're talking about a national divorce is so insane to me. | ||
| It's so crazy that we've lost the tools to deal with the problems, how to navigate conversations. | ||
| People only like to hang out with people who like things. | ||
| They want to move to blue states or red states. | ||
| Look, you can move anywhere you want, but that's not helping. | ||
| That's actually entrenching the division, right? | ||
| Because then you don't even know anybody outside your bubble. | ||
| On that one I can actually make the total counter argument which is that you should live in a place that is more in line with your values and that by someone like me leaving California where I was in essence literally and figuratively paying into a system that was taking away my rights and locking me in my home and spending my money on nonsensical programs that was leading to homelessness and crime and blah blah blah. | ||
| Well, I'll give you what you're looking for. | ||
| said, hey, I will go to a place where my values are valued and then strengthen that. | ||
| I think that actually that to me, that's the beauty of federalism. | ||
| But I get what you're saying in the long term. | ||
| Then it's like, well, what is the United States? | ||
| Well, I'll give you what you're looking for. | ||
| You have every right to do that. | ||
| And, you know, Schellenberg has written about that. | ||
| Newsom's policies on homelessness are literally backwards. | ||
| San Francisco's are literally back, shelter first, housing earned. | ||
| The problem in aggregate, though, if everybody did that, nobody would even know someone who has a different opinion. | ||
| Like, no one would get to hang out. | ||
| You wouldn't go And you wouldn't go to a dinner party in which you'd view people who are hardcore inveterate leftists or liberals or what have you. | ||
| And then, you know, one of the reasons that people used to accept gays is that if they knew someone who was gay. | ||
| And so the very fact that people will get exposed to you and see you on a personal level, that might be great for you to move to Florida, but it's not doing the social milieu any good. | ||
| It's not doing the culture any good. | ||
| There's a book called The Big Sort a while ago. | ||
| It's not doing anybody any favors by dividing it to these ideological tribes. | ||
| It's not that you don't have a right to do that. | ||
| Of course you have a right to do that. | ||
| Right, no, there's sort of like the granular problem of one's own life and where do you want to live to flourish, and then there's like the meta problem of what do we do with the society that is framing. | ||
| And I will be the first to admit I moved out of Portland. | ||
|
unidentified
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I moved out of Portland, which I was pushing you to do, because I couldn't stand Ted Wheeler. | |
| I had very serious security concerns. | ||
| I moved out of Portland because I just so fundamentally disagreed with the policies The, you know, the danger you call. | ||
| So can I tell you a quick story? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So I was driving back from a friend's house one night, Saturday night, and I saw this guy driving like a lunatic, like truly cracked out or what have you. | ||
| So I do what any sane person does. | ||
| Let me tell you, let me just pause my story. | ||
|
unidentified
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If I have to call 9-1-1, something's gone really wrong. | |
| For me to call 9-1-1, there'd have to be some like genuine catastrophe. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So I call 9-1-1, I'm on hold. | ||
| I'm on hold. | ||
| So meanwhile, I'm following this guy. | ||
| I don't even know how many minutes. | ||
| I was minutes and minutes and minutes and minutes on hold. | ||
| Then he saw me. | ||
| And then he started chasing me in his car. | ||
| Because I was on the phone trying to call to say, hey, the guy's here at this intersection there. | ||
| He's going to kill somebody. | ||
| He's literally going to run someone over. | ||
| 911 doesn't answer. | ||
| To the whole we've seen we see systemic institutional breakdown and that gets back to is that the part that I think everyone's sort of shocked at at the moment that say 70 years ago when we were all talking about this is mostly on college campuses and we just like I actually always felt it was going to spill over into real life that I don't But I don't think most of us really thought, | ||
| oh, it's gonna be like, yes, we will have situations where the cops will not show up. | ||
| Like, I don't know that we all fully saw, on top of now, let's behead children | ||
| and there's justification for it. | ||
| Like, that's a lot. | ||
| Yes, and it's a direct consequence of the ideology. | ||
| Did he follow it? | ||
| Police follow it. | ||
| Here's the two ideas. | ||
| One is that capitalism is an inherent problem. | ||
| The thing that supports or buttresses capitalism is the police. | ||
| So if you can get rid of the police, you can rip down the system. | ||
| And then you have, for example, the manifestation of homelessness in LA. | ||
| It's terrible, terrible. | ||
| Portland is terrible. | ||
| And they've spent millions. | ||
| Businessmen have come in and spent, I shouldn't say billions, I don't know how much, but a lot of money. | ||
| Yeah, I can't say the exact figure, but the idea is that some people in the far left don't want that problem solved, because they look at the manifestation of homelessness as indicative of a problem with the system. | ||
| And as long as we can keep homelessness there, we can see that the system is corrupt, and then we can incentivize people to rip down the system, because we want social justice, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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We want to mediate these larger economic problems, and we know the social issues are the capitalist structure. | |
| That's the other thing. | ||
| It's the shift in thinking that we're teaching kids that all problems are from systems. | ||
| And if I may say one more thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I do want to... | ||
| You may, we're near. | ||
| We're talking. | ||
| In the spirit of ARC, I do want to throw out the criticism of the right on this. | ||
| So the left that I've spent a lot of time criticizing has its unique set of derangements | ||
| that Florence Reid from UnHerd calls this, I love this line, she says, we are living | ||
| in a uniquely stupid age. | ||
|
unidentified
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But... | |
| But the right also has many ideological problems. | ||
| One of those is that while the left thinks that systems are responsible, the right thinks that people can just kind of pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. | ||
| And as a consequence of that, we see Neighborhoods, for example, with tax structures that fund local school systems and poorer neighborhoods don't get schools that are as good. | ||
| I think that's un-American. | ||
| I think everybody should be entitled to a public education in the first grade. | ||
| I also think that because you're under 18 or maybe 21, you shouldn't be denied health care. | ||
| And I think that the right has fallen short on that as well. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Unfortunately, we don't have more time for now, but you would fund students before systems, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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100%. | |
| Yeah, even though you're saying everyone should have the right to a public education. | ||
| That's a different topic altogether. | ||
| But those are not like things where you end up hating the person across from you, hopefully. | ||
| It's mostly like, ah, we just have a different Yeah, you would now hate people based on some identity concern. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Because you would think it's not because you criticize this, not because you don't have the facts, which is Socrates' idea, but you criticize it. | ||
| You don't see it because you're a bad person. | ||
| So there's a kind of moral flaw in the other person. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And we're teaching generations of people this. | ||
| Last question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are you bullish on the future or do you think we're just kind of temporarily screwed? | ||
| I really love to interview positively, but I don't think I can if you want me to be very honest. | ||
| How many minutes do I have? | ||
| You've got two minutes, and I'm getting answers all over the board of it, so I want you to be as honest as possible. | ||
| So, we know what to do. | ||
|
unidentified
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Will we reclaim the will to do what we want to do? | |
| I don't know. | ||
| One of the things that's interesting to me about being in London is how they treat the commons. | ||
| They treat the commons incredibly well here. | ||
| The subways, the systems, the parks. | ||
| I'm worried about $33 trillion in debt. | ||
| I'm worried about the fact that... I'm not even concerned, I'm actually worried. | ||
| I'm worried about the fact that one-third of the taxes collected last year went to pay the interest on the debt. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm worried that nobody really gives a hoot about it. | |
| I'm worried about the national divorce talk. | ||
| I'm worried about wide-scale ideological capture of our institutions, particularly legacy media, legacy institutions. | ||
| I'm worried about the geopolitical situation. | ||
| I'm not just concerned. | ||
| I'm worried about the Israeli-Palestinian problem. | ||
| I don't know the solution to that. | ||
| If I were forced with a gun, I would say two-stage solution, but I don't know. | ||
| I'm not an expert on that. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm worried about Chinese militarization of Taiwan, the semiconductor industry. | |
| No, I'm not averse to them, not littered in that. | ||
| I'm worried about Chinese militarization of Taiwan, the semiconductor industry. | ||
| I'm worried about, I'm not worried about rogue AI or kind of these ex-risk things, | ||
| but I'm worried that we have lost an understanding of what makes America great. | ||
| I'm worried that we don't know, and as Reagan said, freedom is only one generation away from being extinguished. | ||
| I'm worried that we have forgotten why freedom matters, why it's important. | ||
| That's what I'm worried about. | ||
| And unless we start to care about those things, then we can't reconstruct reason. | ||
| Like, we can't reconstruct a civil society. | ||
| So the weight loss was a little bit about dairy and a little bit about stress. | ||
| I think that's... No stress. | ||
| My life has never been less stressed. | ||
| I feel awesome. | ||
| I'm living my own dream, baby. | ||
| I'll see you at dinner. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| Look forward to it. | ||
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop screaming, check out our politics playlist. | ||
|
unidentified
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And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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