Rubin Report - Dave Rubin - Why the Real Challenge Is Just Beginning | Jordan Peterson
Aired: 2025-03-01
Duration: 11:50


=== Democrats Run The Show (03:48) ===

[00:00:00]  We've seen a lot of that incredibly odd reversal.
[00:00:03]  And, well, it's very hard to know what to make of that, except that, well, the evidence is starkly in, isn't it?
[00:00:10]  It's happening.
[00:00:11]  RFK is an excellent example of that.
[00:00:13]  Tulsi Gabbard, turfed by the Democrats.
[00:00:16]  And then, I mean, the Trump administration is run by...
[00:00:21]  Democrats, essentially.
[00:00:23]  The courageous Democrats who were turfed from their own party now run the United States under the guise of Republicans in conjunction with Trump.
[00:00:30]  Well, like, who's going to predict that?
[00:00:32]  Well, I guess you think, well, the last won't be first.
[00:00:36]  Well, yeah, I guess that's I guess they will.
[00:00:40]  How do I possibly do a Jordan Peterson interview in 10 minutes at the end of ARC?
[00:00:52]  My last interview, your last interview.
[00:00:54]  You're about to give the keynote.
[00:00:56]  We got 10 minutes.
[00:00:56]  How do we do this?
[00:00:57]  What do we do?
[00:00:58]  Badly and quick, I guess.
[00:01:01]  What are you going to talk about in 10 minutes from now?
[00:01:04]  I'm going to talk about hardly anything.
[00:01:06]  I'm going to talk about Noah, Moses, Abraham, and adventure.
[00:01:11]  And hopefully I'm going to pull that off to some music.
[00:01:17]  We'll see how that goes.
[00:01:19]  Are you going to be playing some music?
[00:01:20]  No, there's an orchestra.
[00:01:21]  I saw the orchestra.
[00:01:22]  I could see a little Jordan Peterson conducting of something.
[00:01:26]  Yeah, yeah, I've got my cues.
[00:01:28]  This is a fine mess you've gotten yourself into.
[00:01:30]  That's for sure.
[00:01:31]  That's for sure.
[00:01:32]  That's the purpose of life, Dave, is to get yourself in fine messes.
[00:01:36]  How's that going for you?
[00:01:37]  It's going pretty well.
[00:01:38]  There you go.
[00:01:39]  But I don't know that it's going at the level you're going at.
[00:01:41]  Well, get the hell at it.
[00:01:42]  All right, I'm working on it.
[00:01:43]  You're not doing too bad.
[00:01:44]  No, I'm doing all right.
[00:01:45]  You're fired on at least six cylinders.
[00:01:47]  How many are there?
[00:01:49]  That's a good question.
[00:01:50]  There's an infinite number of potential cylinders, unfortunately.
[00:01:53]  I like that.
[00:01:54]  I like that.
[00:01:54]  So I have to say that one of the things that's been most interesting...
[00:01:58]  about this conference compared to the one a year and a half ago is that that one was the end of October of 23.
[00:02:04]  It was right after October 7th.
[00:02:06]  And there was a feeling, despite all the good ideas of the conference, there was a feeling of dread for everybody in the West.
[00:02:11]  Like, is this really all falling apart?
[00:02:14]  Now it's a year and a half later, not even.
[00:02:16]  And we're just weeks after a Trump presidency where there's a feeling of hope here.
[00:02:20]  And that's been making me think, boy, an awful lot can change in a year and a half.
[00:02:24]  And that's probably, you can probably give me a biblical version of that.
[00:02:28]  Yeah, well, things fall quickly and they can rise quickly.
[00:02:34]  I And how do we make sense out of what's happened with Trump?
[00:02:39]  Well, what would we might say about that?
[00:02:44]  The last will be first.
[00:02:46]  How about that?
[00:02:47]  Who's head of NIH? Jay Bhattacharya.
[00:02:50]  Yeah, not bad.
[00:02:51]  Right?
[00:02:51]  It's going to happen.
[00:02:52]  It's like from an epidemiologist who's...
[00:02:55]  Career was threatened with serious cancellation, who was pilloried terribly.
[00:03:00]  Now he's going to run the NIH, by all appearances.
[00:03:03]  And we've seen a lot of that incredibly odd reversal.
[00:03:07]  And, well, it's very hard to know what to make of that, except that, well, the evidence is starkly in, isn't it?
[00:03:14]  It's happening.
[00:03:15]  RFK is an excellent example of that.
[00:03:17]  Tulsi Gabbard, turfed by the Democrats.
[00:03:20]  And then, I mean, the Trump administration is run by...
[00:03:25]  Democrats, essentially.
[00:03:26]  The courageous Democrats who were turfed from their own party now run the United States under the guise of Republicans in conjunction with Trump.

=== Scouts of the Future (02:57) ===

[00:03:34]  Yeah.
[00:03:34]  Well, like, who's going to predict that?
[00:03:36]  Well, I guess you think, well, the last won't be first.
[00:03:40]  Well, yeah, I guess they will.
[00:03:44]  So at your opening speech, you were basically giving the story of Passover.
[00:03:48]  It was the story of Exodus, of the Jews leaving Egypt to go to the Promised Land.
[00:03:53]  And you were talking about the, what did you call them?
[00:03:55]  Well, they were the 12 tribes, but they were the people that went in first.
[00:03:59]  Yeah.
[00:03:59]  What did you refer to them as?
[00:04:01]  Scouts of the future.
[00:04:01]  The scouts of the future.
[00:04:02]  Yeah.
[00:04:02]  I was thinking as you were talking about that, that seems to me to be some of these people that Trump has brought in.
[00:04:07]  Trump sort of brought us all out of Egypt.
[00:04:10]  And now he's sending the scouts to go look and figure out what do you have to do?
[00:04:14]  How do we do all of this?
[00:04:15]  I mean, it really is beautiful when these stories can make some congruence.
[00:04:18]  Well, one of the interesting things about that story is the insistence that you have a moral obligation to be optimistic about the future.
[00:04:26]  And the future, well, the future is akin to the present.
[00:04:31]  It will be occupied by many of the same people.
[00:04:34]  It's rife with formidable and even apocalyptic challenges.
[00:04:38]  And that's always the case.
[00:04:40]  And the question then is, what's the appropriate moral attitude in the face, even truly, of a potential apocalypse?
[00:04:47]  And the answer to that always is faith, courage, and the optimism that springs from faith and courage and that isn't naive.
[00:04:57]  You're required to do that morally.
[00:05:01]  In some ways, that's even the defining characteristic of faith.
[00:05:04]  And so what does that mean?
[00:05:05]  It means what...
[00:05:08]  Caleb and Joshua do report to Moses when they're sent to Canaan to scout out the future.
[00:05:13]  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.
[00:05:23]  And I think that's right.
[00:05:24]  I also think that's the right rejoinder to the Malthusians, even from a biological perspective.
[00:05:29]  Their notion is...
[00:05:32]  It's a zero-sum game and we'll multiply till we consume all possible resources.
[00:05:37]  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.
[00:05:46]  I think that's true.
[00:05:48]  And so, if it's true, you're called upon to be a forthright and optimistic scout of the future.
[00:05:54]  And then, you're the people who lead the lost to the promised land.
[00:05:58]  And yes, yes, that seems correct.
[00:06:01]  Do you feel that your life is actually completely congruent with what you just said there?
[00:06:08]  Because that's what I was thinking when I was watching you give that speech.
[00:06:11]  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.
[00:06:15]  But you've done it, or you are doing it by putting truth into the world.

=== Dimensions Of Congruence (04:58) ===

[00:06:20]  We met 10 years ago, and you were a little-known psychology professor, and I was a little-known podcaster.
[00:06:25]  And look at what has happened here.
[00:06:28]  completely congruent.
[00:06:29]  That's it.
[00:06:31]  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.
[00:06:48]  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.
[00:06:57]  And I don't think there's a limit to that.
[00:07:00]  Do you feel that?
[00:07:01]  Do you feel that on a daily basis?
[00:07:03]  Or is it just...
[00:07:03]  Well, you know, the cost for mistakes multiplies.
[00:07:06]  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.
[00:07:16]  And so that congruence is a constant pursuit rather than a permanent attainment.
[00:07:24]  And it's always an error.
[00:07:26]  Part of the reason you fortify yourself in relationship to that is to surround yourself with people who are also helpful and awake.
[00:07:35]  You know, and I have a lot of good people on my team.
[00:07:38]  My wife is very helpful, my kids, my security staff, all the agents that work with me.
[00:07:44]  You know, they're always reminding me and tapping me and making sure that everything's on track.
[00:07:52]  And so far that's going well, but...
[00:07:55]  It's not like I would ever presume to assume that that's a fait accompli, right?
[00:08:03]  It's like surfic.
[00:08:05]  It's like surfic.
[00:08:06]  There's a balance there, but you're still in the waves, and you better watch the hell out.
[00:08:15]  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?
[00:08:24]  Turn back on that sense, and now I can just grow from here.
[00:08:28]  You know, that you'll just continually grow.
[00:08:31]  No, I don't feel, I wouldn't say I feel that.
[00:08:37]  I think you have to maintain that underlying awareness of fragility.
[00:08:43]  I think that's also part of gratitude.
[00:08:45]  When things are going well, you have to remember how unlikely that is.
[00:08:49]  You know, when Tammy has been accompanying me on stage a lot, and...
[00:08:54]  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.
[00:09:01]  And one of the enabling factors that make that possible is the cultivation of the right attitude towards the crowd.
[00:09:12]  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.
[00:09:26]  You should never take it for granted, even for a second.
[00:09:28]  It's the same when people approach you on the street and they want to talk to you.
[00:09:32]  You know, you don't want to be dismissive.
[00:09:34]  You don't want to ever be above that.
[00:09:37]  Maybe you have to speed along because you have a priori commitment, but you want to not...
[00:09:44]  Part of that religious humility is not taking...
[00:09:49]  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.
[00:10:01]  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.
[00:10:10]  Maybe for five minutes.
[00:10:11]  Yeah, maybe, maybe.
[00:10:14]  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.
[00:10:20]  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.
[00:10:32]  And so, at the moment, there's many things happening.
[00:10:37]  In my life that are insanely positive.
[00:10:40]  The Peterson Academy is flourishing.
[00:10:42]  We have 50,000 students.
[00:10:43]  My kids are doing well.
[00:10:45]  The public response, as it is at ARC, is very positive.
[00:10:50]  And there's an unlimited horizon of opportunity in front of me.
[00:10:55]  But by the same token, you're a fool to take any of that for granted.

=== Incredible Achievement (00:51) ===

[00:11:01]  And you want to be awake and dancing the whole time.
[00:11:06]  It's also extremely entertaining, right?
[00:11:09]  I mean, it's ridiculously engrossing and interesting.
[00:11:12]  Well, now I want to see what you're going to do with the orchestra up there.
[00:11:15]  And just personally, I'm really glad to hear you say that, because this is incredible, what you have built here.
[00:11:19]  It is genuinely incredible, and I think it's changing the world for the better.
[00:11:23]  And this is just a perfect example of everything you've been building.
[00:11:27]  And now you've got to go give a big speech.
[00:11:29]  So this was the 10-minute Jordan Peterson.
[00:11:31]  I didn't really have to do much.
[00:11:33]  It's good to see you, Dave.
[00:11:34]  Thanks for coming to London, man, and thanks for your help.
[00:11:36]  Yep.
[00:11:37]  Good to see you.
[00:11:38]  If you're looking for more eye-opening and worldly conversations, make sure to dive into our international playlist.
[00:11:44]  And if you want to watch full interviews on a wide variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here.