March 1, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
11:50
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| We've seen a lot of that incredibly odd reversal. | ||
| And, well, it's very hard to know what to make of that, except that, well, the evidence is starkly in, isn't it? | ||
| It's happening. | ||
| RFK is an excellent example of that. | ||
| Tulsi Gabbard, turfed by the Democrats. | ||
| And then, I mean, the Trump administration is run by... | ||
| Democrats, essentially. | ||
| The courageous Democrats who were turfed from their own party now run the United States under the guise of Republicans in conjunction with Trump. | ||
| Well, like, who's going to predict that? | ||
| Well, I guess you think, well, the last won't be first. | ||
| Well, yeah, I guess that's I guess they will. | ||
| How do I possibly do a Jordan Peterson interview in 10 minutes at the end of ARC? | ||
| My last interview, your last interview. | ||
| You're about to give the keynote. | ||
| We got 10 minutes. | ||
| How do we do this? | ||
| What do we do? | ||
|
unidentified
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Badly and quick, I guess. | |
| What are you going to talk about in 10 minutes from now? | ||
| I'm going to talk about hardly anything. | ||
| I'm going to talk about Noah, Moses, Abraham, and adventure. | ||
| And hopefully I'm going to pull that off to some music. | ||
| We'll see how that goes. | ||
| Are you going to be playing some music? | ||
| No, there's an orchestra. | ||
| I saw the orchestra. | ||
| I could see a little Jordan Peterson conducting of something. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I've got my cues. | ||
| This is a fine mess you've gotten yourself into. | ||
| That's for sure. | ||
| That's for sure. | ||
| That's the purpose of life, Dave, is to get yourself in fine messes. | ||
| How's that going for you? | ||
| It's going pretty well. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| But I don't know that it's going at the level you're going at. | ||
| Well, get the hell at it. | ||
| All right, I'm working on it. | ||
| You're not doing too bad. | ||
| No, I'm doing all right. | ||
| You're fired on at least six cylinders. | ||
| How many are there? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| There's an infinite number of potential cylinders, unfortunately. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| So I have to say that one of the things that's been most interesting... | ||
| about this conference compared to the one a year and a half ago is that that one was the end of October of 23. | ||
| It was right after October 7th. | ||
| And there was a feeling, despite all the good ideas of the conference, there was a feeling of dread for everybody in the West. | ||
| Like, is this really all falling apart? | ||
| Now it's a year and a half later, not even. | ||
| And we're just weeks after a Trump presidency where there's a feeling of hope here. | ||
| And that's been making me think, boy, an awful lot can change in a year and a half. | ||
| And that's probably, you can probably give me a biblical version of that. | ||
| Yeah, well, things fall quickly and they can rise quickly. | ||
| I And how do we make sense out of what's happened with Trump? | ||
| Well, what would we might say about that? | ||
| The last will be first. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Who's head of NIH? Jay Bhattacharya. | ||
| Yeah, not bad. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| It's going to happen. | ||
| It's like from an epidemiologist who's... | ||
| Career was threatened with serious cancellation, who was pilloried terribly. | ||
| Now he's going to run the NIH, by all appearances. | ||
| And we've seen a lot of that incredibly odd reversal. | ||
| And, well, it's very hard to know what to make of that, except that, well, the evidence is starkly in, isn't it? | ||
| It's happening. | ||
| RFK is an excellent example of that. | ||
| Tulsi Gabbard, turfed by the Democrats. | ||
| And then, I mean, the Trump administration is run by... | ||
| Democrats, essentially. | ||
| The courageous Democrats who were turfed from their own party now run the United States under the guise of Republicans in conjunction with Trump. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, like, who's going to predict that? | ||
| Well, I guess you think, well, the last won't be first. | ||
| Well, yeah, I guess they will. | ||
| So at your opening speech, you were basically giving the story of Passover. | ||
| It was the story of Exodus, of the Jews leaving Egypt to go to the Promised Land. | ||
| And you were talking about the, what did you call them? | ||
| Well, they were the 12 tribes, but they were the people that went in first. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What did you refer to them as? | ||
| Scouts of the future. | ||
| The scouts of the future. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I was thinking as you were talking about that, that seems to me to be some of these people that Trump has brought in. | ||
| Trump sort of brought us all out of Egypt. | ||
| And now he's sending the scouts to go look and figure out what do you have to do? | ||
| How do we do all of this? | ||
| I mean, it really is beautiful when these stories can make some congruence. | ||
| Well, one of the interesting things about that story is the insistence that you have a moral obligation to be optimistic about the future. | ||
| And the future, well, the future is akin to the present. | ||
| It will be occupied by many of the same people. | ||
| It's rife with formidable and even apocalyptic challenges. | ||
| And that's always the case. | ||
| And the question then is, what's the appropriate moral attitude in the face, even truly, of a potential apocalypse? | ||
| And the answer to that always is faith, courage, and the optimism that springs from faith and courage and that isn't naive. | ||
| You're required to do that morally. | ||
| In some ways, that's even the defining characteristic of faith. | ||
| And so what does that mean? | ||
| It means what... | ||
| Caleb and Joshua do report to Moses when they're sent to Canaan to scout out the future. | ||
| They say, well, it's a place of formidable challenge, but if we maintain our upward aim and our covenant with the divine, then there's no desert we can't make bloom. | ||
| And I think that's right. | ||
| I also think that's the right rejoinder to the Malthusians, even from a biological perspective. | ||
| Their notion is... | ||
| It's a zero-sum game and we'll multiply till we consume all possible resources. | ||
| And the rejoinder to that is, human beings transform the idea of resource itself, and the future is a place of unlimited possibility, if you maintain your upward aim. | ||
| I think that's true. | ||
| And so, if it's true, you're called upon to be a forthright and optimistic scout of the future. | ||
| And then, you're the people who lead the lost to the promised land. | ||
| And yes, yes, that seems correct. | ||
| Do you feel that your life is actually completely congruent with what you just said there? | ||
| Because that's what I was thinking when I was watching you give that speech. | ||
| I've seen you do this a million times, and I'll see you do it a million more times, and I'll see you put order into the world. | ||
| But you've done it, or you are doing it by putting truth into the world. | ||
| We met 10 years ago, and you were a little-known psychology professor, and I was a little-known podcaster. | ||
| And look at what has happened here. | ||
| completely congruent. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That never happens, I would say, because the dimensions of congruence become more complex and the requirement for congruence becomes greater as you ascend, so to speak, as your obligations multiply. | ||
| The price you pay for making a mistake increases and the level of commitment that you have to bring to bear on the problems increases. | ||
| And I don't think there's a limit to that. | ||
| Do you feel that? | ||
| Do you feel that on a daily basis? | ||
| Or is it just... | ||
| Well, you know, the cost for mistakes multiplies. | ||
| The amount of attention that you have to bring to bear increases because the cost of failure is higher and higher and the standards become higher and higher. | ||
| And so that congruence is a constant pursuit rather than a permanent attainment. | ||
| And it's always an error. | ||
| Part of the reason you fortify yourself in relationship to that is to surround yourself with people who are also helpful and awake. | ||
| You know, and I have a lot of good people on my team. | ||
| My wife is very helpful, my kids, my security staff, all the agents that work with me. | ||
| You know, they're always reminding me and tapping me and making sure that everything's on track. | ||
| And so far that's going well, but... | ||
| It's not like I would ever presume to assume that that's a fait accompli, right? | ||
| It's like surfic. | ||
| It's like surfic. | ||
| There's a balance there, but you're still in the waves, and you better watch the hell out. | ||
| Do you feel that there are threshold moments throughout that where you feel like, oh, well, now I've accomplished this or reached this level or something, and now I won't? | ||
| Turn back on that sense, and now I can just grow from here. | ||
| You know, that you'll just continually grow. | ||
| No, I don't feel, I wouldn't say I feel that. | ||
| I think you have to maintain that underlying awareness of fragility. | ||
| I think that's also part of gratitude. | ||
| When things are going well, you have to remember how unlikely that is. | ||
| You know, when Tammy has been accompanying me on stage a lot, and... | ||
| I don't know, she's probably opened a hundred times now, and she's got to be a pretty good, maybe even a very good public speaker. | ||
| And one of the enabling factors that make that possible is the cultivation of the right attitude towards the crowd. | ||
| The music helps because we have a musician that plays before our lectures, but we're always trying to remind ourselves, and it's the same with this convention, This is very unlikely. | ||
| You should never take it for granted, even for a second. | ||
| It's the same when people approach you on the street and they want to talk to you. | ||
| You know, you don't want to be dismissive. | ||
| You don't want to ever be above that. | ||
| Maybe you have to speed along because you have a priori commitment, but you want to not... | ||
| Part of that religious humility is not taking... | ||
| Anything for granted, and realizing that there's a thousand ways to fail, and success is unlikely, and if it happens to be visiting you now, you should be very, very cognizant of that and aware of it. | ||
| You know, people often believe that if a miracle occurred, they would now be a dedicated follower of the divine, and that's not right. | ||
| Maybe for five minutes. | ||
| Yeah, maybe, maybe. | ||
| What's right is that there's miracles happening in front of you all the time, and if you were awake, you'd see that, and maybe that would bolster your faith. | ||
| And my sense is that if you're speaking to a multitude and they're not throwing stones at you, then you bloody well better be pretty happy about that, because it could be seriously otherwise. | ||
| And so, at the moment, there's many things happening. | ||
| In my life that are insanely positive. | ||
| The Peterson Academy is flourishing. | ||
| We have 50,000 students. | ||
| My kids are doing well. | ||
| The public response, as it is at ARC, is very positive. | ||
| And there's an unlimited horizon of opportunity in front of me. | ||
| But by the same token, you're a fool to take any of that for granted. | ||
| And you want to be awake and dancing the whole time. | ||
| It's also extremely entertaining, right? | ||
| I mean, it's ridiculously engrossing and interesting. | ||
| Well, now I want to see what you're going to do with the orchestra up there. | ||
| And just personally, I'm really glad to hear you say that, because this is incredible, what you have built here. | ||
| It is genuinely incredible, and I think it's changing the world for the better. | ||
| And this is just a perfect example of everything you've been building. | ||
| And now you've got to go give a big speech. | ||
| So this was the 10-minute Jordan Peterson. | ||
| I didn't really have to do much. | ||
| It's good to see you, Dave. | ||
| Thanks for coming to London, man, and thanks for your help. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yep. | |
| Good to see you. | ||
| If you're looking for more eye-opening and worldly conversations, make sure to dive into our international playlist. | ||
|
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And if you want to watch full interviews on a wide variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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