April 28, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:00:58
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| The difference is the contrast is so stark between those blue cities and the red cities. | ||
| It's just it's it's so stark is to be shocking to me. | ||
| And when we we talked about this as well. | ||
|
unidentified
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So. | |
| People think this is weird, but I take pictures of bathrooms wherever I go, the commons. | ||
| And I told you yesterday, the reason I do this is because I think that the way that people treat bathrooms, public bathrooms are the commons. | ||
| And the way that people treat those commons tells you about the society. | ||
| And first of all, In San Francisco, they're all closed. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| In Portland, an overwhelming number of those bathrooms are closed. | ||
| And the ones that are open, there are very few. | ||
| People have committed social justice over them. | ||
| They've graffitied them. | ||
| They're metal. | ||
| They're not porcelain anymore. | ||
| Whereas in Taiwan, we just spent five weeks in Taiwan. | ||
| Those restrooms were perfectly fine. | ||
| There were restrooms in the subway. | ||
| The subway was great. | ||
| The subway was great. | ||
| You know, in Hungary, You know, they don't have laminates over the ads, they're just paper. | ||
| Nobody graffitis them, nobody rips them out, nobody lights them on fire. | ||
| You can walk, there's no... I also take videos of subways, because that's the comments, and I post those, and there's something uniquely sick about this country right now. | ||
| but not all of it, only in certain places. | ||
| So, my old friend Pete Boghossian, as we sat down here, we both said some version of, man, | ||
| we've been doing this for a long time. | ||
| And I am proud to say that I think we are probably both at our lowest weight in the entire time we've been doing this. | ||
| So that's pretty good. | ||
| So I guess, how'd you manage that? | ||
|
unidentified
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I just cut out dairy for the first question, but that's good. | |
| I remember when we first saw each other. | ||
| I don't know how many interviews we had. | ||
| We just hit it off immediately. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We just became friends just instantly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We've done at least a dozen appearances together. | ||
|
unidentified
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Events. | |
| We've done a ton of stuff. | ||
| Mostly on my show, I've done some street epistemology with you. | ||
| We did it at ARC in London just a couple months ago. | ||
| Yeah, we did a Portland State. | ||
| We did a Portland State. | ||
| Actually, well, maybe that's a good place to start. | ||
| So the first... | ||
| We were very early in, for one reason or another, on the woke stuff, on exposing the woke stuff before the woke were called the woke. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And you were a, I want to get it right, you were an associate professor of philosophy. | ||
| Assistant professor, non-tenure track. | ||
| At Portland State. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And we went up to Portland. | ||
| You invited me and Christina Hoff Sommers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We go up there to do an event just to talk about free speech. | ||
| Nothing particularly controversial. | ||
| Nothing crazy, yeah. | ||
| And there were massive protests. | ||
| It was the beginning of Antifa. | ||
| There was huge police presence. | ||
| And the guys, the SWAT team came, remember, with those massive shields and they would lead us in the room and they surround us like we couldn't move. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| I do, I do. | ||
| Andy Ngo, was he a student at the university at the time? | ||
| He was a student at the university. | ||
| So he was a student journalist at the time. | ||
| He recorded some of what happened. | ||
| We had to have police escorts to get to the event from the green room. | ||
| Anyway, this has sort of become old hat at this point, but that was the first time I really saw it or ever thought, wait a minute, wait a minute, how am I controversial in any way? | ||
| Are you shocked at how far things have slid since then? | ||
| I mean, we tried to wake up some people. | ||
| You were at a lefty campus in Portland, Oregon, trying to scream about this. | ||
| You're not there anymore. | ||
| Are you shocked that we just couldn't stop any of this? | ||
|
unidentified
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I guess I'm a little disappointed in myself, to be candid with you. | |
| I'm disappointed in myself because I had a Pollyanna attitude that, oh, if we only exposed it, if we only showed this, if we only did this, then people would wake up or they would realize the institutions have been compromised. | ||
| I mean, now it's a whole nother level. | ||
| I mean, like a crazy level from where it was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe we can go into the plagiarism scandal, what have you. | ||
| But yeah, I'm a little disappointed that I thought that people would just come to their senses, that the moral morass and the ideological capture wouldn't be so totalizing, that there would be some people—there are very, very few people, to be blunt with you, who aren't cowards. | ||
| And so, cowardice, they've just bowed to the orthodoxy. | ||
| They're really just—it's a crisis of People being willing to be forthright in their speech. | ||
| And it's cowardice all the way down. | ||
| So I think everybody watching this has already heard the, okay, something's wrong with the institutions, the colleges are not working, something like that. | ||
| But having been at Portland State, so lefty, lefty, lefty in that city. | ||
| Identitarian lefty. | ||
| So explain, explain identitarian lefty, how you would, how do you like really define that? | ||
| So, so a regular lefty is primarily concerned with economics and equal old school, old school lefty, like equalizing class struggle, Marxist class struggle, new Identitarian lefties bartered economics for anything with an identity-level salience, race, gender, sexual, quote-unquote trans status, and so those replace class. | ||
| So they primarily look through the world through an identitarian lens, like, oh, it's a black man, | ||
| intersectional lens, but he has, you know, educated in Haiti | ||
| or whatever. So those concerns guide their decision making, and | ||
| they think should be the main determinants of public policy. | ||
| And in essence, that's what we call woke now, right? | ||
| That is the woke thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's Marxism, which was economic, laid in now with gender and race. | ||
| That's like a simple way to... Yeah. | ||
| I never use Marxism because that turns off people, but yeah, it's this idea... Let's say equity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Equity based. | ||
| That's good enough. | ||
| We could go on for definition, but that's good enough. | ||
| So I think obviously most people watching this get that. | ||
| People that know you get that. | ||
| People that know me get that. | ||
| But what about the other professors and the faculty at that time at the schools? | ||
| Was nobody listening to you? | ||
| Were they all in on it? | ||
| Were they all just cowards? | ||
| Did nobody stand up? | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| Or why did no one stand up? | ||
| Yeah, that's a great question. | ||
| They were extraordinarily successful at creating an atmosphere of fear, and they had institutional mechanisms to keep people in check, to punish you, that they would weaponize. | ||
| So if you questioned the orthodoxy, they would come for you. | ||
| Even if you'd ask a simple question like, oh, what's the evidence for this? | ||
| So it's hard to know how many people were true believers, but certainly There were true believers there who managed through the simple... It was so simple, Dave. | ||
| The simplest castigation, the simplest dispersion, you're a racist. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| Like, that's all you needed, and that's it. | ||
| So people didn't speak up. | ||
| They didn't ask for evidence. | ||
| They participated in the takeover. | ||
| Here's something really interesting. | ||
| When I was going through all these incessant, constant investigations, somebody from the president's office... To be clear, the school started investigating you because you were basically... Everything. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| You were basically holding free speech events. | ||
| I was being complained about. | ||
| I was, you know, Title IX investigations, diversity committees, my boss was constantly calling me in. | ||
| Yeah, so if they don't like you, they just steal your time. | ||
| So why is it happening? | ||
| I mean, a lot of reasons. | ||
| Like, most things in life, it's multifactorial, though that's kind of a pretentious word. | ||
| But so it was people wanted to get promoted, people wanted to be, to virtue signal to their communities, | ||
| people wanted to be respected outside the universities, people wanted other people to think they're moral people, | ||
| moral people believe this, I believe this, I'm gonna trumpet it. | ||
| So there were a number of factors. | ||
| You know, you couldn't really publish in a journal unless you wrote something that accorded with the orthodoxy, which was morally fashionable. | ||
| But did the professors who like their New York Times and their coffee and their jazz and their all of that, did they not realize that the city was also collapsing around them because of those ideas? | ||
| I mean, you no longer live in Portland. | ||
| Not only are you not at the university, you don't even live in Portland anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Wisely. | ||
| I'm pretty sure I told you to get out that day. | ||
| A hundred times, a thousand times, yeah. | ||
| So the thing that I've been struggling with, the mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, he, him, | ||
| his, it's not clear to me if he understands that the consequences of the policies that | ||
| he's enacting, like it's not clear that he relates the policies causally to the consequences | ||
| of those policies. | ||
| I have no idea, but coming here to Florida, Miami, Naples, Jacksonville, like, there's nobody committing social justice, in other words, defecating in the streets. | ||
| There's no, yeah, right? | ||
| There's no, like, you walk into the Dunkin' Donuts, there aren't armed police officers or the CVS. | ||
| It's just, it's really, There's no fentanyl lean, you know, when people lean over like that. | ||
| It's fascinating to me that these are really two Americas that we've created. | ||
| And I don't understand why the people who have some kind of administrative authority, mayoral positions or what have you, don't say, okay, so what is Naples doing that we're not doing? | ||
| Why does this place look like a living cesspool when other places don't? | ||
| Could it be our public policy? | ||
| What could it be? | ||
| I don't understand why those questions aren't being asked unless they want to point to those homelessness, fentanyl, what have you, and say, look, this is an example of the capitalist system failing. | ||
| This is why we need to dismantle and disrupt and have a new kind of utopia. | ||
| You're a good guest because I think you just answered the question that you asked yourself. | ||
| I think that's it, right? | ||
| Like, I think that's it. | ||
| They, it's not that they don't see what they have done to these cities. | ||
| Ted Wheeler knows what he's done. | ||
| Ted Wheeler, didn't he get, he had to move into a condo because his first place got attacked. | ||
| He moved out of a condo. | ||
| And then he had to move out of a condo because that, they kicked him out. | ||
| Into his million plus dollar home because they lit a fire in his condo. | ||
| Because they didn't want him there. | ||
| They were so upset about how. | ||
| They were there. | ||
| And again, he, him, his. | ||
| This guy is a leftist, authoritarian, identitarian. | ||
| So I think you answered your own question, though, which was they use the destruction as proof that the system does not work. | ||
| They don't seem to care how many people get destroyed or pushed to the margins in the process. | ||
| However, I don't want to be the NPR of Dave Rubin. | ||
| In other words, one of the things that I noticed from doing a series on NPR was that when A journalist from NPR wanted to figure out what someone on the right believes. | ||
| The thing that I saw over and over again is either they ask a complete idiot on the right or they ask someone on the left, what does someone on the right believe? | ||
| And invariably it's a mischaracterization. | ||
| So I don't want to sit here and tell you that this is what Ted Wheeler believes. | ||
| Part of the problem is that identitarians in general, or maybe even more than general, almost as a universal rule, won't have conversations with you. | ||
| Right, so you do street epistemology where you talk to people and try to get them to understand why they think what they think or why they just say something when you ask them a simple question, right? | ||
| So what is the most generous version of that then? | ||
| The most generous version of why, the it in that sentence is, why leftist mayors in blue cities along the west coast, to a certain extent the east coast, have allowed their cities to become I mean, unthinkably bad. | ||
| I think the most generous interpretation of that is that they believe that, and I'm spitballing, I'm not sure this is true, just so you know, I think that they believe that the system is inherently unfair to groups of people, and by enacting certain policies Those policies are compassionate and kind, even if the consequence of those policies are it increases homelessness or homeless people die on the street. | ||
| I think that's what the thinking is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's pretty generous in that the results of what they do seem to cause chaos and destruction and urban blight. | ||
| Now, if I were prone to conspiracy theories, I would believe that they're in service to a foreign enemy state. | ||
| Because it's almost hard to believe that the urban decay and its rapid onset was the result of mere incompetence. | ||
| It truly buggers the mind to think that. | ||
| Well, that's why I started with the college thing and then jumped to the city thing. | ||
| Because I know in the years that we've known each other, we've gone through a lot of Fancy dinners with fancy people who talk about all of these things. | ||
| And I was always amazed that everybody was always talking about Harvard. | ||
| What's going on at Harvard? | ||
| Something's wrong at Harvard. | ||
| And I would always think, well, I don't care that much. | ||
| All right, Harvard, it's Harvard. | ||
| Whatever it is, it's got a name, but I don't really care that much. | ||
| But now I suppose I see that the Ivy Leagues really did go out of their way to breed several generations Of people, I'll say it more maybe offensively than you will, with sort of broken brains. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I sympathize with these kids. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's my point. | |
| That's a terrible thing to say about them, that they have broken brains. | ||
| They're extraordinarily mediocre intellects. | ||
| No, I mean, it's just true. | ||
| They are. | ||
| I mean, I sympathize with these kids. | ||
| When you were teaching these kids, did you have a sympathy for how confused they were when they would come into your classroom? | ||
| No. | ||
| I felt that at some point I was doing them a disservice because I wasn't really allowed to teach them, especially since I taught critical thinking and ethics. | ||
| I wasn't allowed to really challenge and probe and question. | ||
| Now I can do that. | ||
| I can go on the street and I can do that to people. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It's rewarding. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| But my concern was that I wasn't giving them the education that they deserved. | ||
| In spite of my best efforts and constantly fighting with the administration about it. | ||
| Because what? | ||
| I'd just be brought up on charges. | ||
| I would be accused of something. | ||
| I would be, you know, my time would be stolen. | ||
| I'd be harassed. | ||
| So why? | ||
| I mean, I was doing them a disservice because they were thinking that they were getting an education, but they were not. | ||
| The whole raison d'etre of the institution is to replicate the dominant ideology. | ||
| Like, that's what it exists for. | ||
| Portland State, that's what it is. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's an idea factory. | |
| It's an ideology mill, and they have certain conclusions that they just forward to students, and then they assign articles that they themselves have written that the students Or their buddies, their ideological colleagues have written their peers, and then the students answer back on exams. | ||
| Like, they go into the classroom knowing that they have the right answers to moral questions, and the goal is to just constantly replicate the ideology. | ||
| You know, every disparity in outcome is due to systems. | ||
| It's not if racism occurred, it's how it occurred. | ||
| You know, the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. | ||
| It's the Kendi thing. | ||
| Your denial of your racism is evidence of your racism. | ||
| That's the, um, D'Angelo thing. | ||
| I mean, you can just go down the litany of things. | ||
| So, okay. | ||
| So if we look at what's happened at the universities and then we look at what happened at the state level, as you just said, you're now in Florida bouncing around, you named five different cities and things are clean and you're not seeing the, Fentanyl walk and all that and everything else. | ||
| We have some old people here leaning over, but our old people here even look pretty good. | ||
| Do you have hope that that can be healed? | ||
| Do you even care if that discrepancy between the states can be healed? | ||
| Boy, that's a good question. | ||
| I guess the first thing, the first solution to solve any problem, the first step is to be honest about it. | ||
| And we're not honest about our problems. | ||
| We're not honest about black homicide rates. | ||
| We're having McDonald's has spoken very eloquently about that. | ||
| We're not honest about our debt, you know, $54 trillion. | ||
| We're not honest about, I mean, we can list off the things about which we're not honest. | ||
| So in order to solve those problems. | ||
| Border, for example. | ||
| The southern border, which is totally insane. | ||
| If you're not willing to be honest about the problem, you're never going to solve it. | ||
| But you have to see those things as a problem in the first place. | ||
| So, am I hopeful? | ||
| No, I'm not hopeful at all. | ||
| I mean, you know, I know that optimism sells. | ||
| Pessimism sells too, I suppose. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think, you know, if you come in, people are like, oh, that's great. | ||
| You know, I feel great. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, we're just not willing to be honest about our problems. | |
| Forget about even being honest. | ||
| Dave, we're not even willing to have conversations about our problems. | ||
| Forget about being honest about them. | ||
| You know, like the transmedicine, the W-path, the Twitterphiles. | ||
| It's Schellenberger, my buddy, and he's been on your show a few times. | ||
| We're just not willing to have an open conversation. | ||
| And those people who are, they're excoriated by people. | ||
| They're just people who lose their minds. | ||
| So is that part of the thing, that we don't No one ever pays. | ||
| We never have the right people pay for the problems, meaning we had this fiasco of COVID, regardless of whether we see it completely the same on the margins or not. | ||
| This like three-year fiasco. | ||
| Nobody got fired. | ||
| Nobody got really, you know, some, you know, they sent Fauci once or twice to Congress, but nothing happens. | ||
| There's no, there's no accountability, where we're just like, okay, so it was wrong. | ||
| Let's not do it again. | ||
| Thus, we will do it again. | ||
| You know what kills me in terms of accountability? | ||
| The surgeons who have mutilated children's genitals. | ||
| The fact that these butchers will get off, the fact that the hospital administrators who facilitated this will get off, this is an epic crime. | ||
| And the fact that this is still going on, yeah, so there's no accountability in the system. | ||
| And also, the system isn't transparent anymore. | ||
| You know, we're claiming, in the academic context, we're claiming to both have meritocracy and want to promote equity, or have Office of Diversity and Inclusion. | ||
| I mean, this is just... | ||
| It is no wonder that there's a crisis of confidence in institutions. | ||
| People don't trust their institutions. | ||
| I've been screaming about this for years. | ||
| Are you shocked? | ||
| Is the trans one the craziest one to you? | ||
| Like it's one thing to watch some of the race stuff happen. | ||
| It's one thing to maybe watch border stuff happen. | ||
| But the trans thing, does that strike you as sort of the most outwardly insane one? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| Schellenberg and I have done two things on this. | ||
| The trans thing is we could kind of put it in a little graph format. | ||
| Maybe you can post that on the site just to make it easy for people to understand. | ||
| It's just extra crazy. | ||
| And it's the fact that we did something And I have to explain why we did this. | ||
| The fact that we did this to children... | ||
| I mean, it's just so ghastly. | ||
| The fact that our institutions, that we allowed surgeons to butcher kids without any, like, manufactured evidence is crazy. | ||
| That, it's genesis goes back to queer theory. | ||
| It's genesis goes back to we have to queer everything. | ||
| Which, it doesn't mean like, if you're gay, it means we have to have an alternative approach to viewing some kind of entrenched or established norm, something that's And so you're born in the wrong body. | ||
| And our friend Andrew Doyle has talked about this very, very well. | ||
| This is basically an overt assault on homosexuals. | ||
| Because basically they're taking usually effeminate boys. | ||
| Over 50%. | ||
| Or sort of more jockey type girls. | ||
| Yeah, and those are comorbidities. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So those are covariant with each other that increase the likelihood that you'll get your genitals mutilated. | ||
| Right, so basically, if you cared about the gays, so to speak, you would be fighting the trans thing harder than anyone else, actually. | ||
|
unidentified
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100%. | |
| And that's the other problem with organizational and institutional capture, is that the psychologists, they're trained in that ideology, right? | ||
| So they, again, remember, think about it as the goal of the institution is to replicate the ideology to help people develop what the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire calls a critical consciousness. | ||
| So you want to develop a consciousness, queering is part of that consciousness. | ||
| You want to affirm people's gender. | ||
| So it's not as if, oh, someone suffers from gender distress, how do we alleviate it? | ||
| We send them to a psychologist. | ||
| But the psychologists themselves have been credentialed in a process which is corrupt. | ||
| The whole thing is corrupt, all of it. | ||
| It's literally all corrupt. | ||
| Right, so this is what Abigail Schreier's new book is about, because basically what you're saying | ||
| and what she writes about is that in essence, if you were to send a kid who is confused about their | ||
| gender, which some kids could be, part of growing up | ||
| and puberty and everything else, and you send an 11-year-old girl who thinks she's a boy | ||
| or wants to be a boy, basically you're sending her to a system that is designed not to help her think | ||
| that through and maybe say, okay, wait on this. | ||
| The system is actually incentivized to, let's put you on drugs, let's mutilate you, I know that there are people listening to this, and I know they're going to say, these people are not corrupt. | ||
| They were just following the best available evidence. | ||
| They're mistaken. | ||
| This is what I have to say to those people in no uncertain terms. | ||
| There is Right now, in our institutions, people are being busted, thanks to our mutual friend Chris Rufo and others, for plagiarism in their dissertations. | ||
| It is the senior DEI person at Harvard, Claudine Gay, who kept her salary, by the way, 900,000 a year. | ||
| 900 grand, oh man. | ||
| The chief, the Title IX officer. | ||
| It's just, it's, so many people are getting caught right now, and they're retaining their positions. | ||
| They broke the rules, They obtain their credentials fraudulently. | ||
| So to all those people listening to this who are saying, oh, these people are just mistaken, then explain to me why people who obtain their credentials fraudulently through lying and cheating are still in positions of authority. | ||
| Do you think that there's another more nefarious reason even that they went after the kids? | ||
| I mean, my theory on the COVID thing, why they were pushing it on the vacs on kids, my feeling was it really had nothing to do with the kids. | ||
| My feeling was if they could get you as a parent to inject your kid with something that you did not know what it was, They basically own you for life at that point. | ||
| No, I don't think that's it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Because to me, the idea that you would then be like, boy, you know, a year ago I injected my kid with that thing. | ||
| I better start asking some questions. | ||
| That is a pretty freaking scary premise. | ||
| Okay, so what you just did with all due respect is you assumed a kind of intelligence that | ||
| they do not have. | ||
| They do not have this kind of, I'm going to be smart and make a conspiracy. | ||
| These are extraordinarily mediocre minds. | ||
| So they are in service to an ideology. | ||
| They, and remember, their epistemologies are cut off. | ||
| In other words, they're never taught another way to think about a problem, another way to know it. | ||
| They're taught that questioning a problem is itself a kind of moral failing. | ||
| So I don't think there's any vast conspiracy out there. | ||
| I think that the ideological capture is so totalizing in these people. | ||
| It's so totalizing. | ||
| That's why they don't talk to people on the other side. | ||
| That's why they don't debate. | ||
| That's why they don't have conversations. | ||
| is because they're at core, it's a mechanism that prevents the ideology from being dislodged. | ||
| Right, okay, so this is important, because I don't think it's a crazy notion, | ||
| what I just put out there, that they would encourage kids to get vaxxed because then they would sort of own the | ||
| parents. | ||
| But basically what you're saying is, they're not that clever. | ||
| That it's sort of, in some ways, not that we compare everything to Nazis these days, | ||
| but it's, well, I was just following orders. | ||
| So up and down the chain, everybody was just like, Oh, Vax those kids. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Someone told me to Vax the kids, Vax the kids. | ||
| Oh, Vax this guy who's 45 and healthy and works out and is out in the sun every day, Vax that guy. | ||
| And, and it's not, it's not a, we're, we're very prone to conspiracy these days. | ||
| It's not conspiracy. | ||
| It's just, I don't even know what you would call that. | ||
| You would just call that a bunch of nothing. | ||
| It's just a bunch of nothing that keeps running through the system. | ||
| Yeah, doubt your doubts is the famous Mormon. | ||
| So we've created, we've engineered a system and built into the architecture of the system is don't question, don't challenge. | ||
| It's good if you don't do these things. | ||
| But again, this is a very complicated problem because you can't really talk about this unless you talk about the corruption in the peer review process. | ||
| It all gets back to academia. | ||
| That's the source. | ||
| That's where it all comes from. | ||
| That's why legacy media is corrupt. | ||
| That's why the airline industry is corrupt with diversity hired. | ||
| It's all one. | ||
| It's all unicausal. | ||
| Basically, this is idea laundering. | ||
| A bunch of people get together who are academics. | ||
| They have a moral impulse. | ||
| They write about it among their friends. | ||
| They discharge that moral impulse in the journal. | ||
| It's idea laundered, and out the other side, they pass it off as knowledge. | ||
| Then they teach those things in the class, and then those kids get out X number of years, and they become leaders, administrators, etc., and then they institutionalize the principles that they learned from the classroom. | ||
| That's how the, it's like it metastasizes throughout the society. | ||
| And here we are. | ||
| Here we are. | ||
| It's a complete fiasco. | ||
| So is, do you think our politics is just a reflection of that? | ||
| Meaning we just, we're getting these candidates now who are just sort of mirroring exactly what the system was kind of designed to do. | ||
| Put out a bunch of people who couldn't think critically and know what the real issues are and that you would be able to manipulate incredibly easily and everything else. | ||
| I'm hesitant to say this, but I'm just going to say at my age... Come on, why not? | ||
| At my age, I'm just going to say it. | ||
| You get in a democracy, the system you end up with, you deserve. | ||
| If you're upset with the situation in San Francisco, you deserve it. | ||
| You deserve it because you voted in these people who caused the situation in the first place. | ||
| So we have to take some accountability for our voting decisions. | ||
| We have to take some accountability for the systems that we create. | ||
| In Portland when they rampaged for 300 days and assaulted police officers and I mean the whole thing was so crazy. | ||
| You have to take responsibility for your choices. | ||
| It literally is that simple. | ||
| Thus, you are here in the free state of Florida at the moment. | ||
| At the moment. | ||
| And then I'm heading out again. | ||
| I'm heading out. | ||
| The way your body slumped as you said there. | ||
| No, I've just, you know, I'm not gonna lie to you. | ||
| I've been super down about the polarization. | ||
| I've been super down about the, you know, I get the Make America Great Again. | ||
| Like, I get it. | ||
| I've just been super down. | ||
| I don't really see a way out of the debt. | ||
| I don't see a way out of the bitter caustic divides. | ||
| I don't see a way out of the I mean, you know, the fact that Gavin Newsom was elected again when California's consistently ranked homelessness in the top three concerns and drug addiction. | ||
| I just, I just don't, I'm just, I don't know. | ||
| I'm tapping out, man. | ||
| I'm just... | ||
| I'm trying, I'm fighting, and I will fight for my country, and I will fight to the bitter end, but I will say that reality has slapped me in the head and sobered me. | ||
| Because in spite of these efforts, the ideology continues to move forward, and the number of exogenous threats to the country... I mean, the most obvious thing should be closing the southern border. | ||
| Like, that should be the least ideological thing of all. | ||
| And to be clear, you still consider yourself a liberal, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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I do. | |
| You consider yourself a liberal. | ||
| I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think you've mostly at least voted Democrat for your life, right? | ||
| Entirely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've never voted for Republican in my life. | |
| And here you are basically taking the most hardcore Republican position on the border, which is not controversial at all, obviously. | ||
| But that was the position that Barack Obama had adopted. | ||
| That was the position that's traditionally Democratic. | ||
| It's like the Colin Wright diagram of the stick figure when the left has just gone completely crazy. | ||
| I mean, this is totally insane. | ||
| The fact that you could have a border with pedophiles, Rapists, murderers walking over it. | ||
| It's not only an anathema to national sovereignty, it's an anathema to any kind of sane person who wants to look at this and say, well, geez, why are we letting, I remember, I'm older than you, but I remember when I was a kid, Castro emptied the mental institutions and the prisons and he sent everybody to Miami, where we are now. | ||
| I know you probably don't remember that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's okay. | |
| I got a lot of good Cubans here. | ||
| But it seems to me that when you ask Americans, the border issue consistently comes up. | ||
| I think it's in the top five issues. | ||
| So it would seem that there's an incentivization for Biden. | ||
| And I don't want to make this political because I don't think it's a Democratic, Republican, conservative, liberal thing. | ||
| I think it's just an evidence. | ||
| That's the other thing I'd like to do. | ||
| I'd like to move all of these discussions to evidence. | ||
| What is the evidence for trans quote-unquote trans youth? | ||
| What is the evidence for closing the border? | ||
| What is the evidence for shelter first housing earned? | ||
| What is the evidence for you know systemic racism? | ||
| Why why Asians need higher test scores than African Americans? | ||
| Like I'd like to move it beyond the politics right and left binaries in terms of like talking about evidence and the evidence seems pretty clear right now about the borders. | ||
| So when I talked to my remaining liberal friends, who've largely voted Democrat their entire life, or when we talk about guys that you know, guys like Coleman Hughes, who was on The View recently. | ||
| Yeah, I just saw him, yeah. | ||
| You know, basically destroying the woke, being attacked by the women of The View, but then in essence said, I'm not going to vote for Trump. | ||
| We are left with this binary choice, and I wonder what leaves these last liberals, as everyone knows, I talk about on my show relentlessly. | ||
| I think they're the last group in America who could really move right now. | ||
| What would cause someone like you, to me, and I say this to you with love as a friend, I don't know how in your right mind you could vote for Democrats anymore knowing everything that you know about things. | ||
| But I suspect that's not something that you would really want to talk about. | ||
| No, I'll talk about anything you want to talk about, other than my personal language. | ||
| So I guess if the question is what would it take me to vote for? | ||
| Yeah, because I keep seeing a lot of these people, like even if you took a Joe Rogan type, he hasn't fully said he'll vote for Trump yet. | ||
| But it's kind of obvious that's what he should do. | ||
| Maybe Bill Maher won't get there. | ||
| Coleman Hughes maybe won't get there. | ||
| but I'm trying to figure out what is the thing that would take all the people who acknowledge | ||
| what the real problems are, and then maybe there's a political chance at some of it. | ||
| All right, I'll answer your question directly. | ||
| It would take a non-Trump, it would take a Vivek Ramaswamy, it would take an RFK running as, | ||
| it would take somebody, I just, I don't think that, I don't have TDS. | ||
| Well, first of all, this doesn't answer your question, but it's worth stating, this is horrific for our democracy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's horrific for our country. | ||
| Literally nobody I know thinks that the runoff is a good idea. | ||
| And, you know, we go all around the world. | ||
| My buddy Reid and I, we do the spectrum treat of epistemology. | ||
| Dave, it is an embarrassment. | ||
| It's an embarrassment when people say Trump, Biden, and they laugh at me, as if I had something to do with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I would like a non-Trump, and I don't have TDS. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just, I'm so discouraged. | |
| The fact that those two guys are there is evidence that we're marching toward hospice as a nation. | ||
| And yet here we are. | ||
| So what does a guy like you do in November? | ||
| I'm not trying to pin you that I think it's so important that you tell me you're voting for Trump. | ||
| I'm just trying to understand more so the mindset of the liberal that now gets it on all of the issues and will either end up not voting or voting for, and I'm not accusing you of this, voting for the person who will usher in all more of I don't think I could do the latter. | ||
| So the honest answer to your question is I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what to do. | ||
| political, I got you, I know who you're voting for. | ||
| I'm just trying, yeah. | ||
| No, you never have to worry about that. | ||
| So the honest answer to your question is I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what to do. | ||
| I wish I knew what to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| I know that I'm going to keep fighting. | ||
| I know that. | ||
| I don't think that the ideology is sustainable long term. | ||
| I don't know the damage that it's going to do to our institutions in the meantime. | ||
| I don't know about external threats about Ukraine. | ||
| I don't know about China, Taiwan. | ||
| I don't know about the semiconductor. | ||
| There are just so many problems right now that we have to think about. | ||
| I don't know what I'm going to do come the election. | ||
| Has any of this I think we've discussed this once or twice, but it's been about a year or so since I've had you on in this capacity. | ||
| Has any of this changed your beliefs as far as belief? | ||
| Because I found during COVID, the people that made the most sense to me were believers because they didn't necessarily have to just believe. | ||
| Because they didn't necessarily believe in the science, they believed in something else. | ||
| Whatever that might be. | ||
| And I thought that that helped keep a lot of people sane, where the people who believe in the science, we saw an awful lot of people, some people who we were friends with at times, really go off the deep end, believing in how the science was changing every given day and everything else. | ||
| And I wonder, did any of that shift you in any which way, or challenge any of your beliefs in that regard? | ||
| Yeah, I have been thinking about a An unbridled optimism that I used to have when we could bring about a society or maybe even a civilization in which religious dogma played much less if any of a role in it and the question is was that | ||
| Doctrine were those doctrines of prophylactic against people becoming insane like thinking men can become pregnant mutilating children's genitals Thinking that there's literally the society is overrun by racists and not the literal Nazis running a goose stepping in and out of Starbucks and so I I don't I don't I Do think that I was overly optimistic about the consequences and I certainly did not expect the current fiasco that we see Did you see this video of Richard Dawkins talking about that recently? | ||
| I did. | ||
| Just to be clear, he's had that position since the God delusion about a Christian nation. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But he doesn't... I thought there was something about the interview that made it, I guess, in light of what's happened in the UK, even since October 7th, where he's seeing these marches of Islamists throughout hundreds of thousands. | ||
| I was there as well. | ||
| I was there for that. | ||
| So what do you make of that? | ||
| I mean, you know, this is a... | ||
| This is a real problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I thought diversity was our strength. | |
| Not our strength. | ||
| Not their strength either. | ||
| So what do I make of that? | ||
| That Western societies seem to be now shifting in a much worse direction for say a free thinker or an atheist or a non-believer. | ||
| I guess one of the questions I have is, is Islam fundamentally incompatible with Western democratic society? | ||
| People have talked about that. | ||
| Faisal Almutar, a good friend of mine, had public discussions about that. | ||
| I'm deeply disturbed by immigration. | ||
| I had a great conversation with Matt Goodwin about this, who suggested a solution to this is a five-year moratorium on immigration in the UK. | ||
| I am deeply concerned. | ||
| You know, my buddy and I, Reid, we were getting cabs, and so, you know, I have a million things going on in my head, and we talked to the cab drivers, and he said, oh, what is all the equipment? | ||
| You know, get those Uber XLs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And like, oh, we're filming. | ||
| What are you filming? | ||
| You know, we're going to Speaker's Corner. | ||
| And he said, well, what are you doing about the Jews? | ||
| And then I was like, all the years, like, you know, I have a million things going on. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| He's like, well, did you know that the Jews control everything? | ||
| Who do you pay your rent to? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm like, and then I'm, you know, doing the Colombo thing. | |
| Oh, you know, I don't know. | ||
| We're just here. | ||
| He says, well, you know, the Jews caused World War II. | ||
| Yeah, and did you know that that so he just keeps going off and then I had this idea like you'd be really interesting to do a kind of version of taxicab confessions in which you just found taxicab drivers named Mohammed and just start asking questions about Jews. | ||
| So I do I am concerned about The dramatic rise in Islamic immigration, specifically as it relates to Jews. | ||
| I am concerned about the national sovereignty and the... Carl Benjamin, I think you've had him on your show as well, we've spoken about this. | ||
| I am concerned about the... | ||
| British consciousness in a way that I'm not concerned about the American consciousness. | ||
| I'm concerned that... That's interesting. | ||
| Wait, can you explain that a little bit further? | ||
| Because I agree with that. | ||
| I think America has better defenses against, for a lot of this, than Britain specifically. | ||
| Yeah, well, in a very real sense, we are a nation of immigrants. | ||
| And in a very real sense that we have the type of immigrants we take to this country are skilled and educated. | ||
| That's not the case with the UK. | ||
| I think the, I had an interview with Eric Kaufman, and he was saying something that was just so interesting to me. | ||
| He said, you can Take a look at what ethnic group does what based upon their contributions to the treasury. | ||
| Some ethnic groups contribute to the treasury, some take away from the treasury. | ||
| And then I thought to myself, geez, I wonder if you could... Imagine if even making this suggestion, you get like 5,000 comments, Boghossian is a right-wing maniac. | ||
| I wonder if you could make a rational, sane immigration policy. | ||
| Could you base that on what groups have made contributions to the treasury? | ||
| And what groups have taken away contributions to the treasury? | ||
| But the fact of the matter is, even making that suggestion, and that's, not only does it put you in the right-wing camp, but the moment someone is in the right-wing camp, that makes it so that the people on the left don't have to do the intellectual work to figure out what's wrong with the argument, and engage them, and that gives them a reason to not, that's another thing, like not, I'm not gonna go on your show because I'm not gonna platform you. | ||
| Okay, so, in other words, that's yet another Excuse that the ideology has created that you're the mouthpiece of the ideology for to not be dislodged. | ||
| So then you don't want to platform somebody. | ||
| In other words, you don't want to be able to you don't want to be put in a situation where you have to defend your own ideas like have an apologia for those ideas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And as it pertains to immigration, let's say, countries go through different phases where things are a little bit different. | ||
| Give us your poor, tired, and your huddled masses. | ||
| A hundred percent. | ||
| It made a lot of sense for probably, I don't know, you could say at least a century. | ||
| At the moment, relative to all the problems that you've talked about here, does it really make the most sense? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, no. | |
| No. | ||
| But then the question is, Why can't we look at that non-ideologically? | ||
| Like, why can't we look at that solely on the basis of evidence, without saying, that's a right-wing position, that's a left-wing position? | ||
| Do you think it's because of this? | ||
| I think that's a major contributory variable. | ||
| The phone, for the audio listener. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's a major contributory variable. | ||
| You know, but I think virtue signaling is a part of it. | ||
| I think these things have been dormant in the American psyche for generations, but now they've been exacerbated and amplified by social media. | ||
| Tribalism. | ||
| So one of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately that I talk about on the show a lot is that it almost seems to me that this was all inevitable. | ||
| In some respects, that where we are exactly at this moment in 2024 was going to happen no matter what. | ||
| There were going to be some people to speak up against it, not fully maybe understand the nature of it, but that we're all trying and all that stuff. | ||
| There were going to be some institutions that maybe had a little bit of a better force field, some were going to fall quick, but that relative to being given the world in our pocket, Now powered by AI in ways that we cannot understand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| This precarious moment that Western civilization seems to be teetering on seems like there was no way around it. | ||
| What do you think of that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know the answer to that question. | ||
| I don't think that history has a telos. | ||
| I don't think we're at the Fukuyama thing. | ||
| I don't think we're at the end of history. | ||
| I think that there are too many variables. | ||
| You know, a few nukes snuck into American cities could have changed everything. | ||
| You know, Archduke Ferdinand, an assassination here, an assassination there. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm not a determinist in terms of the... So I don't know the answer to that question. | ||
| I do know... But does it feel to you like right now we're in a tinderbox situation? | ||
| Well, we talked about this a little bit over dinner the other night, but that we're in this weird situation where it almost feels like whatever the next Archduke Ferdinand thing is... | ||
| That obviously kicked off World War I. Like, we're just right there. | ||
| Like, we have all the conditions for now, like an odd thing happening, like Archduke Ferdinand being assassinated, that could set off a series of just crazy things. | ||
| It seems obvious to me. | ||
| And I hate to talk about it. | ||
| It's a horrible thought, but we better start thinking about this stuff seriously. | ||
| It seems obvious to me. | ||
| And the solution also seems obvious to me. | ||
| The solution? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think I mentioned this to you before. | ||
| My dad was a civil engineer, and we went hiking once, and the water was polluted. | ||
| Did I mention that to you? | ||
| You told me this, but tell the people. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's just fascinating. | ||
| And I said, well, how do you clean up the water from the system? | ||
| He said, well, the first order of business is just stop polluting it. | ||
| Forget about cleaning up, just find where the source of the contaminants, the particulates, whatever it is, just stop it. | ||
| We know the source of the problem. | ||
| We know exactly what it is. | ||
| It's the university system. | ||
| It's the K-12 system where those teachers get certification and training in the university system. | ||
| I've said this. | ||
| But what does that look like functionally? | ||
| So, okay, everyone watching this can maybe get their kids out of school, start homeschooling. | ||
| Don't send them to college. | ||
| Okay, but that's the beginning. | ||
| Okay, but that's a set of people. | ||
| But that's only part of the problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, you can't just rip something down. | ||
| You got to build something up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So that's why, for example, I was a founding faculty fellow at the University of Austin and I'm an advisor to the University of Austin now. | ||
| So we have to build new things. | ||
| Ralston College, Blackwood, Stephen Blackwood's a buddy of mine. | ||
| He's been on your show. | ||
| You've had conversations. | ||
| We have to build new institutions. | ||
| We can't just tear something down without building them up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| But the other thing is, that's only That's stopping the contamination. | ||
| We're not actually cleaning, we're not removing the particulates from the riverbeds. | ||
| What we need to do is, we know that there are, for example, the best way to solve problems in a democracy is we, and it's messy, yes it is messy, I'll give that to you, is we have to start talking across divides. | ||
| We absolutely have to start talking to people with whom we have substantive disagreements. | ||
| There's just no if, ands, or buts. | ||
| We have to have people in different friend groups who have different views and different positions from us. | ||
| You have to know people who think differently from you on fundamental issues. | ||
| Abortion, climate change, immigration, whatever it is. | ||
| Right. Religious issues. However, you know, you know that everyone watching this is thinking the | ||
| exact same thing, which is, well, I'm willing to do that, but the other side doesn't seem to want | ||
| to do that. And that largely is true. Not exclusively, but largely is true. | ||
| Well, I would love to sit here with you and tell you that you're wrong, | ||
| but I have lost an unbelievable number of friends. | ||
| Mostly, by the way, on my... Mostly because of me, yeah. | ||
| That one position, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Well, that one position about quote-unquote transient kids. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, but I would love to tell you that's not true, but it's true. | ||
| 100% of the people who have abandoned my friendship, people I've cared about, people I can actually say that I've loved, people I assume, at least I hope love me, have told me I'm on the wrong side of history and it's been for ideological reasons. | ||
| What a fucking, oops, what an idiotic reason to You know, throw away a friendship with someone over an idea, over like a policy position. | ||
| Like, throw it away because you're in the hospital and they'd rather watch television, right? | ||
| Like, throw it away from some personal thing, not for some political belief. | ||
| It's just completely insane to me. | ||
| But that's part of the sickness though, right? | ||
| The ideology is so pervasive in people, and it's just so conspicuous, and it's so deep in people, that that's what it makes them do. | ||
| It makes them view people as not merely, as Plato says in the Thaetetus, not merely that they don't have all the correct information so they come to the wrong opinion, but that they're bad people. | ||
| That's what the ideology does. | ||
| And once you can fray friendships and familial bonds... That's it. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| You basically got everybody. | ||
| And I think COVID did a lot of that because, oh, if you don't get Vax, you're going to kill Grandma. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| And everything else. | ||
| You told me the other day that you're thinking, at least, of writing your next book on friendship. | ||
| I am. | ||
| So, I got a good one for you. | ||
| That maybe could be a little story in your book. | ||
| I'd love your take on this. | ||
| So, about five years ago, as I'm leaving the left and talking to all these scary people like yourself and everything else, and getting yelled at at college campuses, I go meet a friend of mine from childhood that I've known literally my entire life. | ||
| Our parents were friends before we were born. | ||
| And he's a lefty. | ||
| We meet. | ||
| We hadn't seen each other for a while. | ||
| Meet at a bar that was close to where we both used to live in New York City. | ||
| We sit down and he had just had a kid. | ||
| I wanted to talk about that. | ||
| Wanted to talk about basketball, other nonsense. | ||
| And I could see he just wanted politics. | ||
| It was just going to be politics. | ||
| So he, it's, it's getting hot. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's just not going well. | ||
| And I kept trying to divert it. | ||
| It's not, it's not getting diverted. | ||
| And he goes, uh, he goes, he goes, Dave, you really figured out a way to make money off this whole thing. | ||
| And I thought of drifting. | ||
| Well, so then I thought, okay, now. | ||
| Now you've just escalated this conversation. | ||
| Now you're attacking my motives, right? | ||
| It keeps going, keeps going. | ||
| It's getting really hot. | ||
| And then finally, I said, because I was really trying to de-escalate, and I think this is the line that you'll appreciate. | ||
| I said, do you think it's possible that I believe what I believe as much as you believe what you believe? | ||
| And without hesitating, he said no. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Someone I've known my whole life. | ||
| And I think that notion goes to exactly what you were talking about. | ||
| Once they can affect that thing, that would have you turn against friend. | ||
| I mean, this is how neighbors report people to the Nazis. | ||
| So what was the glue to that friendship? | ||
| Well, I hate to tell you, but the glue, that was it. | ||
| I saw him one other time after that, it didn't go particularly well, and that was it. | ||
| And you can only fight, you know, you only have so much effort to fight for so many people in so many relationships. | ||
| But I see that happening across the board right now. | ||
| You're describing it yourself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| From, from antiquity onward, there's been a concept in the literature that I learned about years ago that I'm fascinated in terms of friendship. | ||
| I just find this so interesting. | ||
| The Aristotle writes that there are different types of friendship. | ||
| So at the lowest level is, you know, cousins, the next lowest level is like, you know, you like basketball. | ||
| I like, I don't, I can't stand basketball, but you know, we have some kind of, some kind of common interest. | ||
| We both like, what do you, are you at an old fashion? | ||
| I was going to say we both like tequila, but you're at an old fashion. | ||
| Uh, yeah. | ||
| Well, I like eating and drinking. | ||
| Oh, you like eating and drinking? | ||
| You like sushi. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| We both like sushi. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| These guys, too. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, then the next level above that would be conversation. | ||
| This is what the song Breakfast at Tiffany's was about, right? | ||
| I don't know the song. | ||
| You know the song Breakfast at Tiffany's. | ||
| At least we had that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| At least we had that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| At least we had that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the highest level of friendship, and that's why I want to know about the glue, is the friendship between two virtuous people. | ||
| So if somebody is a person of virtue, if somebody has certain character traits, integrity, sincerity, honesty, etc., then it doesn't matter what the ideological difference is. | ||
| And I love that. | ||
| I love having friends that are different and think differently. | ||
| When we saw each other in London, there were about 40 of us, all kind of public people in this space, and we were having all sorts of debates about free speech and what was going on because we were right near rallies, the Hamas rallies, and what should England do and all of this stuff. | ||
| And that got hot at times, but we all left there. | ||
| As far as I know, hugging it out, and that was it. | ||
| Yeah, no, as far as I know, and, you know, James Lindsay and I have had differences, and I mean, I've had differences with all of my friends, but that... Like, I don't understand why your friend would walk into it thinking you're insincere, given that he knows you. | ||
| Well, I think you do know why. | ||
| Well, now I know I know why, because of the ideology. | ||
| I know why, but I just think that there's a kind of baked-in tragedy to that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's the thing that literally nobody, as far as I know nobody, literally nobody is talking about the consequence of the culture war and of mass ideological takeover. | ||
| Basically, to be blunt, we are undergoing simultaneous mass delusions. | ||
| The consequence of that is that we're losing friendship. | ||
| And that's the thing that nobody's talking about. | ||
| And I want to Right about how to get that back again. | ||
| How to recapture or reclaim friendships in light of a deranged world. | ||
| Do you think it's possible that maybe the answer to that is that it's baked in? | ||
| Meaning that things might get so frayed and so crazed and so divided and we'll all have our own truth. | ||
| That the rebound will have to happen, because that's what human civilizations do. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| No, it could get so much worse that it could be inconceivable. | ||
| So just, if I may, just look at... Yeah, I was trying to do a little silver lining there. | ||
| You know, I'm with you. | ||
| I think this thing is going to get worse. | ||
| I see no way around it at this point. | ||
| It has to get worse. | ||
| But I mean, so just situate it in terms of our friendship, right? | ||
| So if I said something that you found odious, I would assume you would text me or call me like, dude, like, what was that about? | ||
| I'd go after you on Twitter publicly. | ||
| So that's the thing you wouldn't do. | ||
| So, but what you're, what you would do is that you, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, so tell me, so I can put it on myself if you want. | ||
| But, so I say something and you're like, whoa. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| No, I text you. | ||
| If I saw you say something or if I saw a video or a tweet of yours or whatever it might be | ||
| that was just completely off the reservation. | ||
| Or vile, or vile. | ||
| Or vile or whatever. | ||
| Of course I would not go after you publicly. | ||
| We've both been through versions of this with other people we know. | ||
| No, of course I text you first. | ||
| Did I miss that? | ||
| Is this edited in a weird way? | ||
| What happened here? | ||
| Okay, so that action, that's what a friend would do. | ||
| A friend would not go after someone on social media until they talk to the person about it. | ||
| Like your first recourse would be to have a conversation with me, right? | ||
| To say, hey man, like whoa, like what's going on? | ||
| And then the way that I would respond to that would be like, | ||
| the next video. | ||
| Like, if I were a virtuous response, I would also have a conversation rather than telling you to screw yourself. | ||
| But there's something that's lost in that in terms of imputing the motives of people with whom we have those disagreements. | ||
| And that, I don't remember that being, I think it is partially social media. | ||
| Like, I don't remember that case at 57, it gives you a nice little look on things. | ||
| I don't remember that. | ||
| It seems to be far more acute now. | ||
| But there are certain behaviors that you can engage in and certain behaviors I can engage in that would make our friendship richer and deeper. | ||
| Like one would be telling each other the truth. | ||
| The other one would be, you know, being sincere. | ||
| If this is a problem, we approach each other. | ||
| But in the culture war, those things have fallen, right? | ||
| Those kind of first principles for friendships and relationships have gone by the wayside. | ||
| So is the only way out of that just literally at the one-to-one level? | ||
| With your friend, with your family, with your neighbor, kind of thing, as opposed to everyone wants this like, you know, they think they can win the culture war, meaning we'll just magically have the culture back and oh, we could then have that robust discussion again, but that's not, in a weird way, that's not winnable. | ||
| It's winnable in your home, something to that effect. | ||
| Yeah, so I've thought about this a lot. | ||
| I don't know if there's a macro-cultural intervention, like an ad campaign or Schumer that we could do. | ||
| I don't know if there's some kind of an intervention, some way we could intervene in people's cognitions to correct The mass delusion. | ||
| I just, to remediate some kind of derangement syndrome that we're suffering. | ||
| The only thing I can think of is at the micro level. | ||
| Individuals, friendships, the way we, the way in which we engage people, the way in which we speak honestly, and being forthright with people is part of that. | ||
| Being willing to change your mind when someone says something to you. | ||
| But there's just so much nastiness and so much, so it's just caustic anger, toxic. | ||
| Is there one, a big one, sort of politically or culturally that you've shifted on in the last couple years? | ||
| Speaking of changing your mind on things, is there something that strikes you as something that you've moved on a bit or are more willing to entertain? | ||
| Boy, I'd really have to think about that longer term. | ||
| Yeah, I think there is. | ||
| I have no appetite for foreign foreign interventions. | ||
| I think my I was never a neocon, but I always I did, and I think this is coming from the grandchild of people who were, who narrowly escaped genocide. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Armenian genocide. | |
| Yeah, so I was, I think I've had my appetite for foreign interventions is much less than it used to be. | ||
| So I've changed, yeah, I would say I changed my mind on that. | ||
| I mean there are other kind of smaller domestic issues. | ||
| I've kind of changed my mind a little bit on abortion. | ||
| In what sense? | ||
| I mean, my current position is abortion up to the first trimester, second trimester, I have to be in utterly extraordinary circumstances. | ||
| I mean, something like truly extraordinary. | ||
| Whereas before, I think I was, and again, I don't want to think about this as a conservative position. | ||
| I know people will look at it like that. | ||
| I think part of it is, as Jonathan Haidt talks about this, it just comes from really listening and trying to understand what other people believe, and then why they believe it, and then using that as a kind of a fulcrum. | ||
| to see if that leverages your own beliefs in terms of whether or not they're true or how much evidence you have for those beliefs. | ||
| Yeah, I think. | ||
| So, meaning you would have been more okay with a second trimester abortion. | ||
| I was never okay with a third trimester abortion. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Which no one was. | ||
| I mean, that also is the irony. | ||
| That seems like crazy, crazy to me. | ||
| I mean, having seen, or having two sons now, knowing what those pictures looked like at seven months, eight months, like... | ||
| That's a human. | ||
| By the way, it's a human at 12 weeks, but there can be some debate about... | ||
| So you can't just accept by fiat that your moral intuitions are the moral intuitions | ||
| that everybody should have. | ||
| You have to make arguments for those. | ||
| You have to give reasons for those. | ||
| And there are no like... | ||
| I mean, I suppose in a sense there are just some rudimentary default positions. | ||
| You know, you can't have people roaming around the street, you know, I don't even know what the default would be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| We don't seem to have the default anymore. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Social justice everywhere. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I think that... You literally, we walked out of the restaurant the other day and you could not believe that you didn't see any homeless people and that there weren't people crapping on the street, which you call social justice. | ||
| It's good to have social justice on the street. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You literally couldn't believe it. | ||
| I was shocked by that. | ||
| Welcome. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And again, the difference is the contrast is so stark between those blue cities and the red cities. | ||
| It's just it's it's so stark is to be shocking to me. | ||
| And when we we talked about this as well, so People think this is weird, but I take pictures of bathrooms wherever I go, the Commons. | ||
| And I told you yesterday, the reason I do this is because I think that the way that people treat bathrooms, public bathrooms are the Commons. | ||
| And the way that people treat those Commons tells you about the society. | ||
| And first of all, In San Francisco, they're all closed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| In Portland, their overwhelming number of those bathrooms are closed. | ||
| And the ones that are open, there are very few. | ||
| People have committed social justice over them. | ||
| They've graffitied them. | ||
| They're metal, you know, they're not porcelain anymore. | ||
| Whereas in Taiwan, we just spent five weeks in Taiwan. | ||
| Those restrooms were perfectly fine. | ||
| There were restrooms in the subway. | ||
| The subway was great. | ||
| The subway was great, you know, in Hungary. | ||
| You know, they don't have laminates over the ads. | ||
| They're just paper. | ||
| Nobody graffiti's them, nobody rips them out, nobody lights them on fire. | ||
| You can walk, there's no... I also take videos of subways, because that's the comments. | ||
| And I post those, and there's something uniquely sick about this country right now. | ||
| But not all of it, only in certain places. | ||
| So to wrap this in a tight bow, a nice little package that people can take with them, a man of logic, of reason, Of the sound mind. | ||
| You're a little scared about the future, but you're going to keep going because what? | ||
| I'm going to keep going because I have hope. | ||
| I'm going to keep going because the solutions are pretty obvious to me. | ||
| And among those are, if you've had a falling out with someone for an ideological dispute or a political dispute, you listen, just reach out to them. | ||
| Just say, hey man, you know, I was thinking about this and hopefully there's something more to our friendship than a mere difference of opinion. | ||
| And maybe that difference of opinion, we can actually Get, you know, do something constructive or have more fun, maybe make our friendship more interesting. | ||
| So reach out to say, you have to be the change you want to see. | ||
| And so I'm not going down without a fight. | ||
| I'm doing everything I can to restore some kind of sanity and decency and civility to the society. | ||
| And I know this is achievable. | ||
| I'm not particularly rosy. | ||
| I'm not particularly optimistic, but I know the path forward and I know that we can do it. | ||
| And the friends you make along the way, you make it all worthwhile. | ||
| That's how the Lord of the Rings ended, right? | ||
| That was the whole thing with the hobbits for all at the end. | ||
| So there you go, my friend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, Dave. | |
| If you're looking for smarter conversations about academia, check out our academia playlist. | ||
| 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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