June 9, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
47:01
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I can sometimes sense that in my own selfishness, I am an obvious participant in systems of corruption. | ||
| That if we withdraw our own selfishness, then that at least is some kind of contribution. | ||
| I don't want to be hokey about it because it doesn't seem enough, does it? | ||
| Sometimes I go, well, I'll just try my best to be a good guy and hope things work out. | ||
| It doesn't seem strident enough or exciting enough. | ||
| But what I do realize now is that if I get out of the way, then at least I'm not participating | ||
| to the degree I was in creating, in polluting what could be so much more beautiful. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right, Russell. | |
| I usually feel like I've got my style down and I'm pretty cool and I have just the right amount of chest for the audience. | ||
| You're rocking the two-button situation there. | ||
| Similar color shirt. | ||
| How did this present itself? | ||
| Well, what I'm concerned about is that I've actually undone too many buttons, and I'm worried that there'll be an inconvenient fold of skin at some point, that my sex appeal will be compromised, and that's the last thing I want in your company. | ||
| But you're always shirtless on camera. | ||
| You're jumping into the ice. | ||
| You're doing your thing. | ||
| How old are you? | ||
| How old are you? | ||
| I'm 48. | ||
|
unidentified
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48. | |
| I'm 47. | ||
| I mean, gotta say, we're doing okay. | ||
| We're doing okay. | ||
| You look very handsome. | ||
| You look very handsome in person. | ||
| And I've noticed in some of the memorabilia about the place that you're aging well. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| It's Florida. | ||
| It's Florida humidity. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Keeps you moist. | ||
| Slimmer. | ||
| Your eyebrows look, I mean, incredibly good. | ||
| All right, I guess we're done. | ||
| That was pretty much all I wanted to do. | ||
| How you doing, man? | ||
| I mean, you just showed up. | ||
| You're in Florida. | ||
| You were obviously in my house. | ||
| You just came like 20 minutes ago. | ||
| We threw your kids somewhere. | ||
| I don't know where. | ||
| Maybe they're in the pool. | ||
| Maybe they're in the movie theater. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| I don't know where my kids are. | ||
| And here we are. | ||
| I feel incredibly grateful to be here. | ||
| There's nothing like an hour long car journey with your children to make you embrace work. | ||
| I mean, I'll talk about Israel, I'll talk about the Trump trial, I'll talk about anything, there's nothing that will be difficult compared to the last hour. | ||
| So you just drove across, you were on Tucker's side of Florida, on the West Coast side, you drove through Alligator Alley, that's what we call it? | ||
| Drove through Alligator Alley, encountered just one Alligator that had been, I would say, significantly compromised. | ||
| Oh, yes, yes. | ||
| And yeah, now I'm here with you, staying in Fort Lauderdale, and I've made this sort of relatively short trip to where you live. | ||
| And yeah, my God, there's no greater pleasure in life than being a father, as you know, but you plumb the depths of who you are to raise those kids, don't you? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You encounter like, oh my god, like, because you're aware, everyone tell you, oh, enjoy it, | ||
| because they're not going to be like this forever, so ensure that you appreciate the beauty of them. | ||
| And god, I'm so with everything now, but this is transient. | ||
| We're not going to be here for long. | ||
| This is, I must maintain this perspective, but there are points, Dave, where like, I mean, | ||
| I could expel them from the vehicle, where I feel like I'm pulling up rage, like from my own child. | ||
| So all I've seen so far is two very well-behaved girls and a young guy who's not speaking yet, | ||
| so you seem to be doing something right. | ||
| Or I guess it's the lady in there. | ||
| Yeah, my wife Laura is sort of brilliantly consistent and nurturing and powerful and I guess, like, if it was a sports team, you know, for me, soccer, there's one player that you're building the team around, the player that's the engine. | ||
| In the UK, that would probably be a central midfielder that's playing just in front of the defence, that's distributing. | ||
| My wife is doing all of that. | ||
| Me, I'm like those players that you had, I guess you had them in NFL, I guess you have them in NBA, players that would maybe still drink They're like crazy. | ||
| They'd be brilliant winning three games and then go missing and you wouldn't see them. | ||
| My wife is carrying the team, I would have to say. | ||
| And like, yeah, on the road, like a family by its nature is, I think, you know, we're not naturally nomadic, right? | ||
| You know, when you're moving around with a family, it's a significant challenge. | ||
| But I'll tell you what, I'm trying my best to deploy the principles that I try to use in conversation that I'm exploring politically. | ||
| And certainly religiously, in raising children. | ||
| Because if these ideas are not applicable in our actual lives, then what is it? | ||
| You know, people like you and me that talk for a living, do you ever find that it just becomes, in the end, rhetoric? | ||
| And then you suddenly realise, oh my god, this stuff's actually real! | ||
| We're in serious danger! | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, there's been a lot of that over the last couple of years, right? | ||
| Because you and I both and several other people in our space, it's like we start talking about free speech and then we see the hit pieces, all of the crazy stuff that comes our way. | ||
| And then you start going, oh man, I really might be jumping into a pool that could be made of something a little different than I anticipated. | ||
| I've been astonished by that. | ||
| That's why it's really important, I think, that we communicate with one another, because at points you're so focused on how do I tell the story of what I believe to be deep state intervention into this particular military conflict, or these set of bases, or these set of interests, You're so interested and invested in how you tell the story that sometimes you forget this is actually happening. | ||
| This is real. | ||
| There is a corporatist, globalist movement manipulating power to an unprecedented level, not necessarily because they're more malfeasant than ever before, though that's a possibility, but because they also have the capacity. | ||
| It's a little more seen than ever before, maybe, right? | ||
| Certainly, but their counter-narratives emerge more quickly, don't they? | ||
| So it's impossible for them to have the kind of uniform control of a narrative that they would have once had. | ||
| That they could just say, this is why we're going into this war. | ||
| This is how this is going to play out. | ||
| Now, immediately there are myriad arguments instantaneously unfolding. | ||
| And just what I suppose I'm trying to say is, this is This is why I think politics has to be practiced locally because otherwise it becomes like an abstract theoretical conversation rather than the business of people's lives, the business of people's spirit, the business of poverty, or the business of despair, or the business of death. | ||
| It becomes just like, you know, how do I tackle this conversation rather than what is this lived reality we're discussing? | ||
| So I'd rather punt most of the political stuff for today What do you think? | ||
| I'd rather do, I know you're on a serious spiritual journey, but also even just spending a few minutes with your wife and kids, like I'd rather do a little more of that and see what's going on there. | ||
| So talk about, so what it's like for you to drive three hours across and have the kid there and like, what is your parenting style versus your wife and some of that stuff? | ||
| Well, I guess first, are you comfortable talking about that kind of stuff? | ||
| You go deep on the spiritual stuff. | ||
| You obviously, all your political opinions and all that's shared. | ||
| But like, on the personal side, like, do you like talking about that stuff? | ||
| Does it make you uncomfortable? | ||
| Well, I'm really protective of the children's privacy. | ||
| And you know what it's like when you live in the public eye, there's a danger that everything becomes a kind of a commodity. | ||
| Our personal approach has been to not put our kids on social media and to keep that somewhat private. | ||
| Because I've been through so many iterations of fame, And I've been really exposing, like in the books I've written, I've always been so candid about my, for example, promiscuity, and the way that I lived, and my drug use, and I would sleep with anybody, and all of that stuff, that as I've | ||
| Change my attitude to fame, as I've started to recognise what celebrity is, as I've started to see the degree of toxicity that exists in that world, the hypocrisy, how much hatred there is in there. | ||
| Hatred, in the end, it comes down to quite sort of important spiritual values. | ||
| I suppose I've developed a different attitude towards what's intimate and what I have to protect, but also It's odd how defined we are by our political opinions and our perspective on something like free speech or military-industrial complex, when actually I'm much more | ||
| Comfortable talking about psychology, my family dynamics, how difficult it is or can be to be in a relationship, the challenges of fatherhood. | ||
| So I am comfortable talking about it. | ||
| I like it because I think you can talk about it in a way that's not exposing to the privacy of my children. | ||
| My family life is what dominates me, particularly You know, going through what happened towards the end of last year, where I felt like I was subject to a significant media assault, and it's something that the investigations into that have been so fascinating and has revealed so much already in terms of the various agencies involved and government department, and it was astonishing and revealing and interesting. | ||
| But also, my family life at that time was difficult because my son had heart surgery when he was 12 weeks old, as I've told you at the time. | ||
| And in a way, it was the incredible gift because it gave me a different perspective on something that was sort of terrifying and overwhelming, but evidently a construct. | ||
| and you realise that your family life is what's actually real. | ||
| And when there's something serious happening, in a way, too, you can see how it helped me to recognise the way that the | ||
| media report on reality. | ||
| They kind of would have been aware that that was happening. | ||
| I was in Great Ormond Street Hospital. | ||
| It's a sort of a famous kids hospital. | ||
| You're only there if your kids have got oncological or cardiological issues. | ||
| And the way the information is selected, the way the information is left out, the way there's things that are amplified. | ||
| So did that story ever break publicly? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Oh, so that's really interesting. | ||
| Yeah, because it's sympathetic, isn't it? | ||
| If you're a father and a family man and you have challenges. | ||
| Of course, that would not exempt anyone that was guilty of actual criminal behavior from the culpability of criminal behavior. | ||
| However, if there's a kind of a construct taking place that looks to be significantly coordinated, then it would make sense that you would leave out any information that was not in alignment with that version of reality. | ||
| A constructed version of reality. | ||
| I'm still working out, as I'm sure any of us are, that we find ourselves in this extraordinary position where media has become different and more demanding. | ||
| Even though we might still use aspects of the aesthetics and architecture of old media. | ||
| A very beautiful set that you've constructed here is what I'm referencing. | ||
| It's changed in terms of its intimacy. | ||
| When I watch the kind of media that my kids look at online, the type of YouTube they look at, I can see how lumpen and clumsy conventional media looks. | ||
| It's so agile. | ||
| They watch things. | ||
| What's that thing they're really Yeah, I was going to say, they're getting way more views than the two of us. | ||
| Yeah, hundreds of millions of views these kids get. | ||
| And actually, when I watch it, I think it's brilliant. | ||
| It's so articulate. | ||
| Jordan is the dad of this little girl. | ||
| And they're sort of like, okay, we're doing this bit on Instagram. | ||
|
unidentified
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This is for our followers. | |
| And then they sort of seamlessly incorporate the sponsorship and the commercial partnerships in there. | ||
| They've actually Excellent. | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| In terms of their production. | ||
| So yeah, like, I suppose, being talking intimately about your family is, I think it's okay, if you're kind of comfortable with it. | ||
| I'm pretty comfortable with it. | ||
| It's certainly probably a more accurate demonstration of who I am and political opinions, probably. | ||
| So you mentioned the, uh, so you, you get this crazy immediate hit piece on you. | ||
| When was this? | ||
| This was like last fall, right? | ||
| So it's last September. | ||
| Your son had just been born. | ||
| Now he has this heart thing. | ||
| And I remember you, uh, you were texting me from the hospital, I think maybe even the day he was having surgery, because I was just trying to see how I could help relative to the public insanity. | ||
| How much of that kind of shifted your all the spiritual stuff that you're going through now? | ||
| I mean you sort of described it as saying that like you knew what was real suddenly but what a weird thing you bring a new life into the world and also your old life is under assault. | ||
| It felt biblical and it's what I've come to what I feel like I've been shown is something that, you know, when you sort of learn something, I'm supposed to already know this. | ||
| I've actually even discussed this. | ||
| I've already said this out loud. | ||
| I've seen myself saying this. | ||
| Why am I learning this now? | ||
| Here's what I mean. | ||
| The first commandment, thou shall worship no other gods than me. | ||
| Clearly i'd made a god of my old life clearly i'd made a god of how other people see me clearly i cared about how i was perceived publicly because when i was subject to allegations. | ||
| I was affected negatively impacted by that and. | ||
| What I've learned through this little period of suffering, primarily because of my beautiful little boy and what he has been through and what we've been through as a family, but also because I've had to alter my perspective on how I'm regarded publicly and how the world treats those kind of stories. | ||
| This extraordinary phenomena that we're all living through, that we're all aware of, because it's happening relatively frequently, and sometimes it seems very deliberate and deployed, and there seems to be hierarchies and scales and legitimacy, and you have to be respectful when talking about it, both because I was a very promiscuous person, and that's a kind of a moral behaviour that needs assessing and remedying, but not from a criminal perspective, but from a moral one. | ||
| And because these are very serious issues and they're people that are seriously affected by the type of things that have been alleged against me. | ||
| What it has led me to do is recognize, to go through a deep reckoning and understanding. | ||
| This is what I believe now, and the reason I've become Christian is because if something happens to you, it's meant to happen to you. | ||
| I can't engage in, that shouldn't have happened, that's unfair, that's been said. | ||
| I recognize that the reality you live is the reality that you're meant to experience. | ||
| And I'm actually incredibly grateful to have been given the opportunity to see how much hubris and grandiosity still lived in me, and presumably still does, because, yeah, annihilation is good for bringing you close to God. | ||
| So do you think, say, two weeks before all hell breaks loose with that, do you feel that you were really going down the wrong path, or it was just like little blinders that you had on certain things? | ||
| Yeah, I don't think I was sort of, you know... | ||
| I don't think it was seriously going down the wrong path because, one, I'm in recovery. | ||
| I don't drink. | ||
| I don't take drugs. | ||
| I have a pretty stringent program around my sexual conduct as a married man, obviously. | ||
| But beyond that, I don't look at pornography. | ||
| I don't masturbate. | ||
| I'm pretty careful about what I do with my eyes, actually, because If you have a background as an addict, you are forced to reckon with and recognise the tendency towards objectification. | ||
| Objectification, I suppose, is just... Even with you, Dave, I could look at you as just, oh, this is a person who can facilitate things for me, a person with power and influence and connections and relationships. | ||
| And if I'm not careful, I'll drift into seeing you that way. | ||
| And I I can't afford to do that anymore. | ||
| I have to live on a plane of spirituality, of recognizing I'm a mortal person, you're a mortal person, we're here to be kind to one another and love one another. | ||
| And when I inevitably forget that and start thinking, oh, maybe they can give me some insights into the tech and how to build this beautiful soft light in, and I love that sliding shot, and to recognize that, oh, I've become a... Wait, so you don't want my guy to help you or what? | ||
| I can't tell anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
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Actually, I do, I do. | |
| I'm just trying to find a Christian way to do that. | ||
| So in a weird way, you're thankful for everything that happened, in some bizarre sense. | ||
| Actually, yes. | ||
| I am thankful because I've come to recognize how much grace I've been shown. | ||
| I've come to recognize that I live a really blessed life. | ||
| I've got incredible children. | ||
| I've got an amazing wife. | ||
| I've got incredible friends. | ||
| I've got a beautiful opportunity to live truthfully. | ||
| We're alive. | ||
| We all know this now, at a really unusual time. | ||
| This isn't some fin de siècle generational narcissism where everyone thinks they're the chosen generation. | ||
| It seems to me that there are a lot of apex events taking place. | ||
| A lot of a sort of a cluster of apocalypses. | ||
| I don't even know how to apocalyptic. | ||
| I don't know how to pluralize apocalypse. | ||
| You shouldn't need to know. | ||
| So, it's, I think, beneficial to recognize that you are living through significant times and that you have to make significant choices, that you can't live in illusion, that you have to recognize an awakening is necessary personally, on a personal level. | ||
| So, that notwithstanding, before you came to that conclusion? | ||
| At the height of all the craziness, did you ever think of just getting out altogether? | ||
| Or at any point, I guess, along your journey? | ||
| The fame? | ||
| The money? | ||
| Like, you don't have to do any of this. | ||
| You don't have to do a daily show. | ||
| You don't have to. | ||
| You could disappear and be with your kids all the time and everything else. | ||
| I mean, is there some piece of you that Has that desire? | ||
| Sometimes. | ||
| And I think since becoming Christian, I am learning in my choices to recognize that, as Rick Warren says, the first four words of his book, it's not about you. | ||
| It's not about you. | ||
| I'm reminded that if my aim is self-fulfillment, And if I am the centre of my universe, then I am probably going in the wrong direction. | ||
| If I can find a new way to do this that isn't about self, you know, I don't want to give myself a hard time because I've always had kind of twin motivations. | ||
| I've always had the kind of show-off gene, but I've always been very dedicated and really cared about what I do. | ||
| And I've always really thought, how can I be more useful? | ||
| How can I be more helpful? | ||
| Like most of us, I've a mix of traits and I vacillate between self and altruism, for want of a better phrase. | ||
| Now, I know that that game is over, that now I have to find a way into continual service. | ||
| I can't afford anymore to fall into the vacuum of self. | ||
| And yeah, I still think I might. | ||
| I'm ready to be led. | ||
| I'm ready to be shown. | ||
| I'm ready to learn more. | ||
| I don't know what's going to happen anymore. | ||
| And it's almost like an impossible thing to traverse because everywhere you go, everyone knows who you are. | ||
| Basically as simple as that, right? | ||
| So you can want to put that aside and put the ego aside, but you walk into a restaurant, people know who you are. | ||
| You walk into my studio, my guys want to take a picture with you. | ||
| That tension is just going to always exist. | ||
| Well, I guess short of some, you know, major shift. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Celebrity, as you know, is something that you learn to negotiate with. | ||
| I've been around a lot of famous people, like you have, so you recognise, you know, maybe people give you attention, but they'd also give attention to a bunch of other people, so what's the big deal? | ||
| I recognise that. | ||
| I'm looking to not validate myself through other people's impressions of me. | ||
| And this is why the Christianity is working so well. | ||
| It's funny because I watched Larry David make an old season of Curb where he talks about how it's like something about worshipping a guy that he thinks is like... Oh, when he was converting, that whole season when he was converting, right? | ||
| When he thinks it wasn't his parents that actually had him, he was adopted by a Christian family. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and I actually like the idea of worshipping a god come to earth in human form, because for my humility to recognise, oh yeah, I'm just another person in the world, Like, I'm not God. | ||
| And I know that should be self-evident to anyone, but sometimes in practice we're living as if we are God. | ||
| We're living as if our fulfillment is the only set of values that are worth pursuing. | ||
| And in Christianity, there's so much clarity around overcome yourself and to seek ye first the kingdom of God. | ||
| This is starting to make sense to me in a way that, you know, I've looked at the Bible once. | ||
| I've read it. | ||
| I'd looked at it before, But I'd not kind of received those lessons. | ||
| In recovery, I'd come to recognize that the reason that programs around alcohol are ingenious is because you don't let go of the alcohol, you let go of the person that was addicted to the alcohol. | ||
| And you recognize that alcohol serves as a symbol, alcohol or drugs, serves as a symbol for attachment to the world. | ||
| And also that if you are in self-will, if you are motivated by what you want, you will ultimately drink. | ||
| And the only way to not drink is to let go of the self-will. | ||
| And unfolding from that realization was the acknowledgement that all behaviors, all practices, all attachments could be let go of through letting go of self-will. | ||
| Now with the new understanding of Christianity, I don't know, I guess I'm starting to see things that were always there. | ||
| There's something very, very familiar about this change. | ||
| And you know what's mad? | ||
| Because Christians are everywhere, so people like Christians are coming up to me and congratulating me on the baptism. | ||
| I feel at ease, I feel blessed, I feel vulnerable about it, I feel frightened. | ||
| I'm coming to terms with some of the intellectual transitions because I guess I've been kind of materialistic and atheistic and New Age. | ||
| Adorned with all these tattoos from across the cultural pantheon, but he was always there, our Lord and Savior, waiting for it. | ||
| It's like somehow I knew that this would happen. | ||
| Do you get any pushback from the more atheist or mindful meditation crowd or humanist crowd that you made this move? | ||
| I sometimes notice in chats that people might have concerns that this is exclusive, and of course... How do you mean? | ||
| You're somehow saying that if you are not Christian, you're not welcome here. | ||
| But what I feel is that while obviously the choice I've made is because I believe it to be the right choice, it's something that I've deliberated over, and actually, curiously, it wasn't a choice that I actually made. | ||
| Just a series of things unfolded. | ||
| I was just reading about Christianity, I was learning about Christianity, and then something really hit me in my heart hard. | ||
| And it has to do with humility, and it has to do with loss, and it has to do with suffering. | ||
| And then a friend of mine, Bear Grylls, you know Bear Grylls? | ||
| S-I-S, Bear Grylls, running wild Bear Grylls, just said, How about I come to your house on Sunday and we'll get baptized? | ||
| I'm sure he said we. | ||
| But he's been Christian his whole life, you know? | ||
| And then he did come to my house and we did end up in the river getting baptized and he bought a minister that baptized me. | ||
| I didn't choose for any of it. | ||
| It happened so beautifully and serendipitously that sometimes I'm very grateful when I'm not the author of changes that are taking place because it suggests to me that there is a higher force, a higher purpose. | ||
| In terms of pushback, people have just said, oh, what does this mean now about meditation and mantras and all these kind of things? | ||
| I'm just learning. | ||
| This is very, very new to me. | ||
| automatically assume that because I've become Christian, everyone that's interested in my content should immediately become Christian. | ||
| I've just done what I believe to be right, and what was shown to me. | ||
| It's just so odd, I think, to have something so familiar, accessible, that's been around me my whole life, suddenly come into the forefront in such an evident, robust, extraordinary, overwhelming, and yet somehow subtle way. | ||
| Well, as a parent, do you feel it's a little bit of, you know, that your kids know something? | ||
| They maybe can't express it, but they know something. | ||
| I think that with my two kids who are 20 months, that they have a deep understanding of something. | ||
| They can't express it yet, but that there is some order in their mind. | ||
| There is something real there. | ||
| And then the world kind of comes in and completely screws it up. | ||
| And then it's your job. | ||
| You're doing it through Christianity. | ||
| Someone can do it another way, but to reorder it. | ||
| And right now we're left in a world that has just been I mean, no doubt that there is an ulterior reality, a deeper and therefore supernatural reality beyond the ordination and metrics that we can read and understand. | ||
| There is something else. | ||
| I've intuited it and felt it my whole life, and I think most of us do. | ||
| And indeed, what is love? | ||
| What is worship? | ||
| What are morals? | ||
| I know there are counter arguments to all of those things. | ||
|
unidentified
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Of course. | |
| I've heard them on evolutionary psychology, reciprocal altruism. | ||
| I've done, you know, some reading on those subjects. | ||
| Even a lot of the guys that are into that and have been preaching that for years are now sort of leaning back on being very happy to be in Christian societies. | ||
| Richard Dawkins now, I mean, of all people, is saying that how happy he is that the UK is a Christian dominated society. | ||
| It's staggering to hear Richard Dawkins, who perhaps more than any living person, has spent time attacking in particular, well not just in particular Christianity, all religions actually. | ||
| I like Richard Dawkins as a human being, I think he's such a brilliant communicator, I really do. | ||
| To hear him say that there appear to be sets of values that in practice are valuable, well many might argue that that in itself is off. | ||
| Right, that would be a Jordan version of it, that that is the proof, basically, right there. | ||
| By his fruits shall we know him. | ||
| Yes, that's an interesting argument. | ||
| And I remember when learning about meditation and when people say, oh, meditation, it lowers your blood pressure. | ||
| And it's like, well, you know, the people that came up with this stuff, they didn't know that. | ||
| They were doing this thousands of years ago in caves. | ||
| And what I feel is that One ought perhaps to look more deeply into what is inferred here and also the limitations of that which can never be truly known. | ||
| Timothy Keller, the minister and Christian theologian from your country, who I understand died recently, He uses a brilliant repurposing of the famous joke. | ||
| There's a drunk looking for his car keys under a streetlight. | ||
| Oh, did you drop your keys there? | ||
| No, I dropped them over there by the hedges, but there's no light there, so I'm looking for them here. | ||
| And Timothy Keller says that's what the world of science is doing, is looking where the light is. | ||
| Because in the realms beyond the senses, there are no instruments for measurement. | ||
| All that we can do is infer the presence of something else. | ||
| Precisely in the manner, in fact, that people do with dark matter and dark energy. | ||
| We can infer the presence of some other force due to the billiard balls elsewhere on the table appear to be moving as if a cue ball has struck them, even though we cannot see that cue ball. | ||
| The more I look at literal gospel Christianity from the Good Book itself, the more it's somehow unraveling Melting away, thawing out my preconceptions, my arid, ardent, severe sense of materialism and replacing it with a certainty only in love, a certainty only in our ability to have a | ||
| A relationship with an indwelling God that died for us. | ||
| That my life isn't about trying to achieve some set of standards that I might be good. | ||
| That it's already done. | ||
| I am here simply to be in a loving relationship and allow that loving relationship to do whatever it wants to me because I can't be in control anymore. | ||
| So, so all that being said, is there something that you're hung up on now? | ||
| Is there anything that when you're seeing that road in front of you that you feel is still keeping you stuck? | ||
| Oh yeah, I'm in constant negotiation with doubt because I've spent my whole life analysing things. | ||
| I don't find trust very easy, I don't find authority very easy, but I know from recovery that things that are antithetical to me are often valuable, like that surrendering to an authority is probably a good thing for me. | ||
| That trusting an all-loving God is probably a good thing for me. | ||
| I'll tell you the thing I'm most excited about. | ||
| The thing I'm most excited about is that Christianity in its first century form is a radical assault on structures of power. | ||
| A radical assault. | ||
| And this is what I believe most, and above all else, about spirituality. | ||
| And if there's one thing that I can bring to the conversation, and there isn't... Come on, get one, get one. | ||
| Come on, I think you can do it. | ||
| It's this, Dave. | ||
| Spirituality oughtn't be about making us fit into a secular world. | ||
| It ought be about making us fit to oppose the problems with a secular world. | ||
| Become spiritual, whether your spirituality is Judaism or Hinduism or Christianity. | ||
| It's not do this and then you might be able to get married and get a better job. | ||
| It's Do this and you will realize that your marriage and your job and your entire life will have no value unless it's as an expression of these principles and of these values. | ||
| I've always felt I don't want to fit into this. | ||
| We all know it. | ||
| There's something not right. | ||
| There's something not right about the world we're living in. | ||
| And that the values have to be derived from somewhere else. | ||
|
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And indeed, I think this peculiar time that we're both commenting on of hypocrisy and of this odd co-mingling of contradictory ideas, values changing, the meaning of words inverting, people claiming that they're trying to protect you and help you in the most barbaric ways, this sense that And it's also interesting because of the tech portion of it, right? | |
| I mean, you mentioned the science portion, right? | ||
| So science has us kind of looking in the wrong spot, but now we're also on the threshold Of basically creating living tech through AI. | ||
| So I keep saying on the show, it feels to me that we're in the exact spot we were supposed to be. | ||
| When everyone thinks, oh, it's so crazy right now, it was like there was no other way to get to the other side of everything had things not gotten to the crazy point that they're at. | ||
| Does that make sense to you? | ||
| Well, you believe that we're at a pivotal moment because of the power that will be unleashed at the point of singularity or actualization. | ||
| We're at a tension between the old world dying and trying to hold on, and a new world trying to be born, and it's being pulled both ways. | ||
| And then I think there's a spiritual component to it, and that our secular institutions are dying. | ||
| I think these things are all connected. | ||
| But it leaves us right now, why all the political stuff that we talk about all the time, I always say this is more of a spiritual problem than a political problem. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I'm still uncertain about the, I understand that, as best as someone without any education in these matters could, the astonishing potential of these tools. | ||
| But I am uncertain as to whether or not they are simply an amplification of existing tools or an entirely different reality. | ||
| And in the famous and often proffered analogy, these tools can be used for, like, because I speak to people No, AI is going to be amazing because we'll be able to do biometrics at borders and we'll be able to... I don't like the sound of that! | ||
| I don't want that ended up in the wrong hands, you know? | ||
| So I'm wondering, are all these phenomenal technologies a version of intelligence or are they a version of consciousness and what is the difference? | ||
| Because if you don't believe that Consciousness is a subsidiary of physical processes, and I don't. | ||
| I believe it's the preceding condition. | ||
| Then we are not yet at the verge or at the precipice of creating consciousness. | ||
| We're at the precipice of creating. | ||
| Intelligence is so refined that they mirror consciousness and it replicates. | ||
| So that could be really scary, right? | ||
| Because then we're creating a fake, basically, of something that we'll believe is conscious. | ||
| Yes, because surely the underlying idea behind it, we've all seen various things, we asked AI to do this thing, and it did this, and it obviously means that it's an indication that it's got a set of morals and values that have been encoded, quite literally, into it. | ||
| It's not yet in a position where it goes, you know what, I don't agree with those morals, here's why, I'm going to be doing this. | ||
| Like, did you see, who's the guy that created Dilbert Scott Adams? | ||
| Oh, Scott Adams, yeah. | ||
| Like, he had a conversation where he said, It's only a fictional plot, but would it be possible to | ||
| steal an election? | ||
| I didn't see that. | ||
| I need to see that. | ||
| Yeah, you'd like it. | ||
| Would it be possible to steal an election? | ||
| What would you do in this fictional plot? | ||
| And he kept telling the AI that it was a fictional plot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wait, what did the AI say? | ||
| The AI says that it... | ||
| that it is possible to steal elections and you would use the CIA and this is how you | ||
| would do it and you'd have a data, like you'd have a data update going to the, into the | ||
| digital voting machines at a certain time that would wipe itself immediately afterwards | ||
| in this fictional plot. | ||
| How bizarre. | ||
| Because it's got Adam's content. | ||
| But at no point during the exchange does the AI go, hey, are you a kind of pundit fucking | ||
| with me right now? | ||
| Because I'm starting to feel that this is not a fictional plot that you're commenting on 2020. | ||
| So to you, that spark of whatever you want to call that, well I guess you'd call that consciousness, that spark of wit in essence, would be That would be enough, in some ways, to be like, alright, we're on the other side of AI. | ||
| We've been talking about this for a long time. | ||
| Frankenstein, Pinocchio. | ||
| What we're saying is that spontaneity, in the moment itself, something unique and divine happens. | ||
| Intelligence is largely about experience. | ||
| Spontaneity is the ever-present moment. | ||
| This is where reality takes place in this moment. | ||
| Imagine if we were refined enough as individuals to continually be reborn again, to be continually resurrected moment by moment, not to be bearing the burdens and the traumas of the past, not in every interaction to be thinking, oh, this person looks like that, they can probably give me this based on my experience of people. | ||
| Imagine if we could be absolutely free. | ||
| This is something that I don't think that can be replicated by our kind. | ||
| And even Well, aside from the technological points that you make, which are all good ones, we are certainly sociologically and politically trying to place, and have been for some time, perhaps since the Enlightenment, certainly more recently, place ourselves at the apex, that humankind is the summit of what is possible. | ||
| We're acting like gods. | ||
| We're behaving like gods. | ||
| We've replaced God with the state. | ||
| We've replaced God with the myth of progress. | ||
| Well, I don't think progress is going to deliver utopia. | ||
| It may deliver some kind of citizen management system that creates utopia for a certain strata of our cultures. | ||
| It cannot do what God is supposed to do, because this is something that requires surrender, not assertion. | ||
| This is about assertion. | ||
| It is martial in its nature. | ||
| It is controlling in its nature. | ||
| Just in the same way that I believe, and maybe I'm being a little hacky here, but they told us that the white goods revolution was going to, you know, you will have so much time because you're a washing machine. | ||
| No one's got no more time. | ||
| People got less time. | ||
| Well, they called it social media and it made us more anti-social. | ||
| So what do you think? | ||
| And look at what it's doing. | ||
| Look at what it's doing. | ||
| Look at what it's generating in us. | ||
| It's so extraordinary that something that could be creating a universal consensus, more democracy, clearer distribution. | ||
| The ability, like when we last spoke, you said that the American experiment of federalism We're supposed to be about allowing 50 different iterations of what a republic or a democracy might be like. | ||
| And look at the tendency towards centralisation and control. | ||
| We all feel it. | ||
| And I think that you say that there's a tension point with technology, and I agree with you as much as I'm capable of offering consensus with the limitations of my understanding. | ||
| But I think that what's also happening as a result of this progression and this communications miracle is there's the sense that, oh my god, you could have representative democracy and electoral power like never before. | ||
| You could have myriad ongoing and unfolding experiments. | ||
| You don't need this tension anymore. | ||
| If we were focused on spiritual progress and spiritual evolution instead of technological and material evolution, then it would be a possibility that we would be comfortable with people living differently. | ||
| There is a pessimism in our worldview that isn't often challenged. | ||
| Oh, you think that? | ||
| People have tried that, but what would happen is people would just exploit the system. | ||
| I think we have to do something about the amount of fear that is driving our decisions. | ||
| Neither side really is offering in the sort of bipolar and bipartisan, but bipolar. | ||
| American version of electorate representative democracy that is a vision of good faith for America. | ||
| Even the recent verdict sort of shows that. | ||
| Some people celebrating wildly, other people grief-stricken. | ||
| Either reaction shows you that this was not about sort of a set of misdemeanors and felonies and use of campaign funds. | ||
| Something emotional is taking place. | ||
| Yeah, well to watch people, I don't even want to go too far into that unless you want to go there, but to watch something that feels to me fundamentally, it is a seminal moment in the history of this country and the world, but to watch the emotional reaction to it, you're right, that's different than sort of the thoughtful reaction to it. | ||
| Some people got what they wanted and some people got everything they didn't want. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's tough, because we've got to live in a country with all these people. | ||
| And what happens after the election? | ||
| When is there going to be a consensus? | ||
| I think what we've arrived at, it appears to me, Dave, I wonder if you agree, that you cannot have a nation, you cannot have a judiciary, unless there is a consensus around what represents authority, around what represents moral authority. | ||
| The process of the judiciary is, well, in cases where there is conflict, we're going to have a process of arbitration where we will be able to decide based on evidence. | ||
| But now, no one's got any trust in that system. | ||
|
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Either. | |
| People reckon, well, this is a tool, a further tool that we can use. | ||
| And, you know, maybe you want Hunter Biden to experience consequences or Donald Trump to experience consequences. | ||
| There's no, I don't think there are many people that believe there is a sort of a transcendent concept of justice that is fair to us all. | ||
| I think a lot of people fought that for a long time, and I think we largely did have it, probably to the best extent that humans can have it for quite some time. | ||
| I don't think many people believe it now. | ||
| Yes, because I suppose it has to pass through the filter of our imperfection, doesn't it? | ||
| And this is, in a sense, what I was trying to convey when talking about our new technologies. | ||
| I think that the centralization of authority and the centralization of power Or be minimised, not maximised. | ||
| I'm not saying that there's an absolute metric or measurement when it comes to the economies or the politics of that. | ||
| But what I'm saying is that a principle might be, do not needlessly aggregate power, decentralised power, to the smallest potential unit. | ||
| The sovereignty of the individual, the sovereignty of the consciousness the ability of individuals to choose for themselves whether | ||
| they want to make themselves kings of their own little fiefdoms or whether we are capable of recognising that we are | ||
| participating in a great gift that we're participating in a great gift and that it's not | ||
| even really my life. | ||
| I can sometimes sense that in my own selfishness, I am an obvious participant in systems of corruption, that if we withdraw our own selfishness, then that at least is some kind of contribution. | ||
| I don't want to be hokey about it because it doesn't seem enough, does it? | ||
| Sometimes I go, well, I'll just try my best to be a good guy and hope things work out. | ||
| It doesn't seem strident enough or exciting enough. | ||
| But what I do realize now is that if I get out of the way, then at least I'm not participating | ||
| to the degree I was in creating, in polluting what could be so much more beautiful. | ||
| Yeah, it's so interesting because I think about that all the time, that I don't want to, | ||
| I don't want to live stream the end of the world. You know, like they say the revolution | ||
| will be televised. I don't want to be participating in the destruction of everything. Well, I think a | ||
| lot of people who do what we do, and I am as imperfect as you are, I assure you, | ||
| I don't want to be doing that. | ||
| Like when this Trump thing happened, I was just like, how do I do it in a way that will not make everybody angry or more scared or the rest of it? | ||
| And all you could do is the best you can do, I suppose, and hope. | ||
| Yeah, and I guess we're having to acknowledge the limitations of our abilities and the limitations of our influence. | ||
| It's such a kind of crowded space. | ||
| You know, you take a wrong turn on the internet, you discover entirely alien worlds with entirely alien views. | ||
| And unless we do learn to create some connective tissue between these places, Well, again, that's why I keep talking about decentralization because it seems to me that that's where the momentum is going. | ||
| The momentum is not, hey, why don't we bring all of this closer together? | ||
| It seems to me you're going to have to let people live differently because otherwise it's going to get seriously out of control. | ||
| I'm taking a total side road for a minute, but it's sort of a theme that we've been doing here. | ||
| Do you have any regrets about the things that you did in the past when you mentioned the being with a lot of women or whatever or the drugs or anything else? | ||
| Because a moment ago when you were sort of just going, I thought for a second, I wonder if he could have done all that had he not opened some of those doors with drugs or whatever else. | ||
| And my line on that is just repeating something that Jordan Peterson says all the time, which is be wary. | ||
| People would ask him, what do you think about mushrooms usually would come up in a show? | ||
| What do you think about psychedelics? | ||
| And his line always was, be wary of unearned wisdom, which I always thought was pretty spectacular. | ||
| It's such a simple way of explaining something. | ||
| But I wonder how you feel about that now, having become the person that you are, on the path that you're on, having done things that clearly you don't do anymore. | ||
| It's difficult to say because, plainly, I have to recognize that my selfishness has had consequences in the lives of other people and it's in effect difficult to find a way to make commensurate my own deep willingness to atone for and make amends for the many things that I have done that were selfish and have had negative consequences with the untrue constructed allegations | ||
| Attributed to anonymized sources brought together by media organizations, seemingly in some cases working with other entities. | ||
| I would do anything. | ||
| I'm on a spiritual path. | ||
| I want to atone. | ||
| I want to make right. | ||
| I want to be of service. | ||
| It's clear to me that if you're living your life only to get stuff, that is a wrong way to live. | ||
| I lived like that for a very long while. | ||
| It's difficult, of course, to say, oh, I wish I hadn't done this, because in a way you're rejecting yourself and you're also making an impossible claim of the universe. | ||
| What I would say is that any wisdom that I have accumulated, and I make no great claims for it, Has been earned, has been earned the long, dark, punishing nights and they continue, they continue. | ||
| And even though there have been sort of psychedelic interludes way back 21 years ago when such things were plausible for me, I am mindful of your quote of Jordan Peterson and also the Maharishi who says it's like kicking down the doors of heaven to use psychedelics. | ||
| Now I use different techniques to access what appear and seem to be planes of understanding that are not ordinarily accessible through rationalism. | ||
| Is that more through prayer or is that an ice bath in the morning? | ||
| Certainly through ritual. | ||
| Through prayer, and through meditation, and through breathwork, and devotion, and dedication. | ||
| And many of the things I'm looking at in scripture sound like people dealing with altered states, whether it's the Pentecost, or Revelation, or many of the acts of the apostles. | ||
| are literally divinely inspired. | ||
| So for me now, I recognize there can be no external agent inducing those things. | ||
| Difficult though this journey is and has been, I accept myself and I accept reality. | ||
| So I don't know that there is much that you can go back and meddle with. | ||
| We're not Marty McFly Day! | ||
| You don't want to see them photos fading. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| Why don't we shift this a little bit? | ||
| Where do you want to go in this conversation? |
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