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March 30, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:06:41
The End of Legacy Media & What Replaces It | Dave Rubin
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dave rubin
35:35
d
david desrosiers
15:08
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sarah steele
09:42
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Speaker Time Text
sarah steele
Very excited to welcome some very special guests.
unidentified
We have Mr. Dave Groven here from The Groven Report.
Thank you.
sarah steele
And Mr. David Rossier from Real Clear Politics.
Welcome our guests.
Mr. Groven, you're up first.
dave rubin
Alrighty. Thank you guys.
First off, thank you for taking a step back.
I normally do this online and I don't see real people, except for like frog avatars that are telling me that I'm racist, so...
It can be a little jarring to be around so many actual human beings.
As I understand it, not all of you are from the free state of Florida.
Some of you live in crazy places like Boston, Massachusetts, that you're under the thumb of Elizabeth Warren.
And I can't imagine waking up every morning and having anything to do with that woman.
So welcome to Florida, where we are free and happy and tan and good looking.
And our clothes fit, and our genitals match, and it's all very exciting.
Wow. Washington, D.C. Yeah.
Washington, even worse, even worse.
unidentified
Well, welcome, everybody.
david desrosiers
Your genitals?
dave rubin
Genitals don't match, or is that, well, whatever works, whatever works, you know.
Anyway, I'm very glad to be here.
I'm going to speak for about ten minutes before we sit down and continue.
You can sit, Dave, and join the line.
They asked me to talk a little bit about what's going on in the media.
You know, we're all caught, obviously, in this culture war, and it's Democrats, Republicans, and Liberals, Conservatives, and everybody's fighting about everything.
But I think the real sun text of what's going on here is that we're in a massive Massive shift in terms of how we get news and how we translate reality.
You know, we are often, as my friend Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic book says, we're all watching the same movie and we're having completely different reactions to it.
And that's a really fascinating thing.
And I think as time goes on and as the media splits and we all go off in our own different directions, it's something we're really going to have to grapple with as a country, as people, as family members and everything else.
Because if we can't agree on what is real, then we have major, major problems on the horizon, which may be coming either way.
So it's interesting.
I see various ages in this room.
I'm probably somewhere in the middle.
I'm 48 years old.
It's not that old.
It's starting to seem a little old to me.
But it's not that old.
and when I was growing up, But let's talk about Ghostbusters for the rest of you.
It's not Dan Ackroyd.
Dan Rather, or Peter Jennings, or Tom Brokaw.
I combined Ackroyd, Brokaw, something.
Okay. But basically what you got was a very sort of narrow wooden window that in essence for the 22 minutes that the program was on, you know, you pretty much had the same stories.
The anchors were kind of the same and maybe the order of the stories changed a little bit.
But the bulk of Americans...
300 million Americans or so, basically got the news within the same paradigm.
It wasn't too far one way or too far the other way, and everyone was sort of focused on the same stories.
That's how it was for a long time.
Of course, cable news comes along, CNN is first, then MSNBC and Fox, which launched basically at the exact same time.
Things went hyper-partisan.
We had 24-hour news.
Then, of course, the phone that we're all walking around with in our pocket comes along.
We have Twitter.
We have Instagram.
We had Vine.
Remember Vine's six-second videos?
And we had Snapchat and all these other things.
And things started speeding up.
And we all started, and it wasn't necessarily our fault, we all started catering what we were seeing to ourselves.
And that was sort of algorithmically based in some sense, but we were kind of doing it to ourselves too.
And that leads us to where we are now, where the mainstream media, largely for their own fault, has virtually collapsed.
I mean, if I was pulling in the daily numbers that Rachel Maddow was pulling in, I'd probably get into another line of work.
And she has millions and millions of dollars and a giant corporation behind her that's pushing.
I think.
But they've lied about virtually everything, whether it was Russia collusion, or it was all the COVID stuff, or if you get the vaccine you're not going to get nor transmit COVID, or whether it was Donald Trump very fine people on both sides, or whether it was Jesse Smollett was lynched and we could do the laundry list of these things.
And they lied and they lied and lied and lied, and they could get away with it for a long time.
And then something actually did shift, and that, of course, was the internet.
So suddenly, when the mainstream Rebecca, yeah.
And what that led to was the rise of, I suppose, people like me and people like Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro.
And I suppose there's some lefty versions of some of us, but not really, because the media largely became partisan left.
It became sort of a piece of the Democrat Party.
So we started getting this alt media that was basically, I would say, centrist.
It was kind of libertarian.
I mean, if you take somebody like Rogan, Who is way bigger than CNN and MSNBC combined.
This is a mushroom-eating, pot-smoking, MMA-fighting, like, conspiracy theorist basically.
Are we applauding mushrooms?
What are we applauding?
But this is somebody who is largely, you know, sort of a default kind of liberal, live and let live guy.
Who then really, I mean, he didn't support him fully until the day before the election, but in essence is a Trump supporter.
And then you could look at people like Elon, who was a lifelong Democrat.
He came along and you could look at some of the people that Trump has in the administration, like Tulsi and Bobby Kennedy.
I mean, with the last name Kennedy, that all of these people who were moderates suddenly all became part of whatever you want to call it, the MAGA movement in America.
First, I would just say wide 10 pro-America movement.
And that really happened, I would argue, because of the alt-media.
Because a bunch of us saw the opportunity.
It was as simple as that.
Any of you can sign up for YouTube, or you can get on Rumble, or you can get on Locals or Instagram, and you can, in essence, do what I do, or you can do what Joe does.
And believe me, I think there's more podcasts than people now.
I mean, everyone is doing this thing at this point.
But what it started to allow was that Overton window that was very, very narrow.
During that 6 30 p.m.
Time slot on the three networks it opened up a little bit with cable news And now it's been completely blown apart, and I think that the the real challenge for all of us now Will be to figure out.
How do you get news in an honest way?
How do you actually?
Sit down with someone who maybe thinks a little bit differently than you or Or who gets their news from somebody else.
And how do you work that out?
I was talking to a couple of you before this and everyone's kind of struggling with this.
Everyone has this in their family.
You know, you just see the same picture and you see two different things.
So as this is happening, it's an incredible opportunity, right?
Like there's an unbelievable business opportunity, obviously, for people like me.
There's an industry that is completely collapsing Hopefully truth will pick up where these people dropped the ball.
And that is the challenge for all of us.
But again, I think it's really, in some sense, it's more of a challenge for you guys.
You now have to discern who is honest, who is a fair arbiter of any of this.
And it's going to completely change.
I mean, we're just now on the very, very beginnings of the AI horizon.
And soon, I mean, we're literally working on it right now for my show.
We're working on an AI version of me to give the news.
Like, I'm going to put myself out of business.
Like, there are so many, and between deepfakes and all of these other things, there are so many things that the world, if you think that the world that I mentioned from 1984 with the three newscasts sounds different than the world that we have now, the world in 15 years is going to be completely unimaginably different than the world that we have right now.
So, it's incredibly inspiring in some sense, right?
Like, we're all part of it.
It's literally any of you.
You all have a phone in your pocket.
Something could happen.
Well, we're in West Palm.
Things are pretty safe and kind of chill out here.
Nothing's going to happen.
Somebody might go out for, you know, late early bird or something.
But you could be anywhere else.
You could be in New York City right now, or you could be at Columbia, or you could be at Harvard when things were a little wackier.
And you can be out there with your phone.
And in essence, you're the newsman now.
And that is as legit I would argue, actually, it's probably more legit than someone that works at CNN or the New York Times or some of these other places.
A really great, very simple example of sort of the fraudulence of all of this is the New York Times bestseller list.
You know, the New York Times bestseller list, did you guys know, It's not based on sales.
It's called the bestseller list, but they have a secret formula that they admitted to about 20 years ago.
So when people sell a book, I mean, sales are the most sort of obvious thing that there is.
Oh, sales.
We know somebody produced something.
Somebody bought something.
We can actually order it.
You think you're looking at a sales list, and they actually did it with political reasoning behind it.
So they reordered their list based on that.
So if a place like the New York Times, all the news that's fit to print, I would argue is probably all the propaganda that's fit to print.
If they're going to screw with their sales lists right in front of you, what else do you think they're screwing with?
So as we see that, again, the challenge is pilfering some truth out of the monopoly of ideas that are out there, which is challenging and it's on you.
And then it's really seeing what businesses arise.
But there's an incredible, for those of you that are in college now, or, you know, if you're under 30, like you have such an unbelievable opportunity to build things right now.
Like America got pretty freaking close to the end.
I really believe that.
Like had the election gone the other way, we were pretty much there.
All of the forces were churning against us.
Everything was calcifying against us because it was too much, right?
We had a president with dementia and a woman who no one believed in that was basically installed and it could have happened.
And the election was way closer than people like to think.
So we got that close to it.
So we have this incredible opportunity right now where for the first time in a long time, We have technological reasons to believe that we can continue to do that.
And it's actually a very exciting time, all of the craziness notwithstanding.
So I suspect we'll continue discussing the rest of that in a moment.
And I thank you guys.
Everybody was nodding all along, which is what I like.
So thank you guys for meeting with us.
unidentified
Next slide, we're set.
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unidentified
I'm sorry.
sarah steele
So I thought, a good question for both of you, coming from your respective positions within the media, broadly, what do you see as, what do you see as some parallels in the shift of America's perception of the media, and then from my side, higher education?
Because there's definitely been, I would say, a decline in both, where the public I think they're both in a basement for a reason.
david desrosiers
I think our institutions have really, you know, Fallen. They haven't met the responsibility.
I mean, your school in particular, its job was to create and educate a natural aristocracy that would serve as experimental self-government.
I think they've swapped out and created a new one.
That's not good.
And the thing I think that's good about the salient that I've looked at some of the archives that you have is that you've actually shown that there's a virtue of sending some of the very best that Harvard still Because when you guys show up there, you understand that you have to bring a better game and make arguments for what you've done.
There's a piece that they did on women's issues that everybody here has to look at, because I think it's the boldest thing.
I mean, I started reading it with my friend Sam, and I'm like, oh my god, I want to spend the next hour reading this.
You're bringing the best minds to the best arguments and the challenges.
If you don't recognize the value of what these best schools and these papers can do, Bill Buckley used to just use what ISI has always supported over the ages, which is like, this is the outlier academies.
This is where you find all your Harry Potters that will make the world a better place.
But when Buckley would go to University of Chicago, he called out into a crowd and said, I want to talk to David Brooks, right?
That's what these papers are for.
That's why these conversations happen.
You're going to bump into people from Harvard.
I've bumped into you guys my whole life.
I think you guys go in there smart.
You don't come out tangibly better.
But all of you guys are undeniable.
And it's great when the people who go there study that mind and show how to engage it.
And I think for a real clear-cut is to bring that type of Well, it's interesting.
dave rubin
I like the fact that you use the word liberal, if in the true sense, because I think we're largely speaking to conservatives here.
But obviously, the classical liberal tradition of individual rights and laissez-faire economics and thought and reason and debate, things that Harvard and most of the Ivy League schools and hopefully all of our places of higher education really used to care about, that came from the classical liberal tradition.
And yet the word liberal from an American perspective has been completely blown apart.
I would say to connect the media portion to the college portion, one of the things that made me sort of aware of this very, very early morning is when I started the report, Back in 2013, and then I was kind of waking up to some of what was happening, I started going to colleges, including Harvard, and I went to colleges all over the country, and I was getting protested.
Constantly, often violently protested, and other people throw things out, and the police would have to show up, and they'd be pulling fire alarms.
A lot of these things are online if you want to watch them.
And I kept thinking, man, what am I saying that is remotely controversial here as I talk about why America is busy?
An individual writes, yeah, well, I was basically talking about freedom.
And, you know, this was when trigger warnings and safe spaces, all of these things, it's sort of ironic.
You look at what's happening at Columbia now.
They've seemingly gotten rid of trigger warnings and safe spaces as they occupy the campus.
But I went there and I saw, boy, there are, and it wasn't just the students.
That was the amazing thing to me.
Yeah. Everything was becoming so hysterical.
So it was happening at the university.
It clearly had been happening at these universities way before.
And then all of the people who graduated these places, they went into jobs, into most of our institutions, they went into jobs in the media.
And then we wondered why everything, and then when you combine it with what I talked about a moment ago with the algorithms and the way that we're catering all of these things to ourselves and all that, everything went hysterically.
To the left.
And my friend Douglas Horry, who I'm sure many of you guys know, he's unbelievably brilliant and speaks in the Queen's English, which makes it even better, but he often talks about how a society that suddenly is debating all of the things that it put to bed can be taken down very easily.
So if as a society, we're suddenly talking about whether boys or girls, Well, then everything else is on the table.
And you can see how that extrapolates now to a place like Columbia where they're debating whether if you're going to allow Jewish students on campus is okay or not.
So all of these things from the media perspective, the institutional layer that we thought, I think that the institutions would stand up and be better.
And it's been very, I would say, shocking to the liberals, maybe more than the conservatives.
The conservatives, I think, Deconstruct it.
do it again.
But then they got blown apart in all of this.
And that is why we're in such a massive political realignment, which is, again, connected deeply to the media.
sarah steele
Another, I think, kind of like interesting version that's happened, inversions happen is that There's an establishment media, and then there's an independent media.
And there's such a thing as conservative news, right, and liberal news, but people usually say, the news, the Democrats, but I repeat myself, something like that.
The news, the Democrats, they're one and the same.
At what point does, for example, your show become a part of the establishment media?
What defines establishment?
Is it corporate oversight, or Is it simply, you know, as long as YouTube is looking at your content, and I know, like, I know from Penn Shapiro's show, there are little words will trick, you know, the algorithm, for example.
Or in terms of, like, the types of headlines that Reel Clear is publishing, you know, like, you see absurd things from other media outlets, like, how do you get traction in articles online?
and get people to see it without succumbing to that kind of like an established media mindset.
So I guess it's a two part question.
What is the East Avenue media?
david desrosiers
I mean, one of the benefits that I think RealClear has is that our method, I mean, if you want to know what constitutes viewpoint diversity, the First Amendment is the existence of viewpoint diversity.
If you go to a page Our page, particularly, you'll find viewpoint diversity, I think, at its perfect expression, right?
So you'll see two rival authorities saying the completely opposite things about the same reality every day, going right down, and then updated twice a day.
The same goes in, where you want to actually find out, like, everybody's doing push polling.
Well, guess what?
Turns out, if you get A number of people that are each probably doing a little bit of a push, you bring them all together and you're cognizant of the fact that there's two sides to something, and you divide by a number, you get something that actually calls elections for the past 25 years.
That's what RealClear does.
Or if you allow people to at least just recognize that we live in a place where the American mind is divided, it's bipolar divided.
Right, but it's like every day.
I think everyone should just go down our list pick what you like But recognize that there's something that challenges you and you just read that right?
So I I think that real clear is probably one of the few Independent and I guess that's why I don't see many competitors to us.
I which is good But it's like I do think we have a place that plays a real salutary role in the news where it's It's the recognition that, you know, that Dave Grohl exists, right?
I would say this prior to anybody, if you wanted to know what the media would have looked like, you know, if RealClear never went into business, there's this blacklist that is put out by GDI, and pretty much Gordon Krovitz's NewsGuard is close to it.
GDI? GDI.
Global Disinformation Index.
It was funded by our State Department, by the way.
And it actually came up with a list of folks that advertisers should blacklist.
And it turns out that RealClearPolitics is number seven on that list.
And it's there, and our sin is that we actually bring the other people on that list to the American people in a conversation.
That's curated to just show both sides.
So, you know, independent media is under assault.
They're trying to kill our business.
They try to brown us out.
If you want to know how they get rid of this free speech, they take away advertising.
Right? And then that limits your ability to do things.
So it's censorship through advertising starvation.
It's improper and bad.
But what I think Real Clear's gift to the American mind, the American conversation, is that we show an ascendant, two-party Healthy.
Maybe not always healthy.
American pursuit of our politics.
But the showing of both sides is hard.
We live in a world where no one wants to see anything that actually challenges them.
I think real clear value is we're like a free Bloomberg news terminal for everybody in the business.
Radio, TV.
You're thinking about what to do tomorrow based off of what you see on our site.
And I think it has a positive good.
And what we've always been able to do with it, it's like, we're the number one drivers of flight.
One of the greatest magazines in this country, a couple of them I would just bring out too, that I don't think many people would know about if it wasn't for us.
It's the Claremont Review of Books.
Fantastic. In City Journal.
Right? These places are places of excellence.
We put those on that same level as the Atlantic.
Right? In the New Republic.
And it's because they deserve to be there.
I don't want a lot of people in the independent lane happy to be there, want to continue.
But there's a great experiment of ours that's being worked out right now.
And I think if we don't get together around the value of viewpoint diversity, we die as an issue.
And we shifted that over to Linda.
David is with me in connection with this thing we call the Samastan Prize.
And the first year we did it, it looked like the window on free speech was closing.
This year it looked like it was half open, right?
And our goal is to keep it open, but the only way it's going to be open is if we make viewpoint diversity the common cause of everybody, be they, you know, conservative, libertarian, liberal.
dave rubin
And by the way, it is opening.
I can give a little more of a white pill version of that, which is that as it pertains to the, uh, to the advertising portion of this, I mean, I've been through just like Ben Shapiro and many other creators, every version of the demonetized and having your channel de-boosted and shadow banned and all of these things that you guys are all well aware of.
I would always say I'm less concerned about things that I know that they're doing.
I'm more concerned about the things that I don't know that they're doing.
And then I was invited to Twitter right when Elon took over.
And Jack Dorsey, who was the CEO of Twitter pre-Elon, he was the guy that was running the thing.
He testified under oath when Ted Cruz asked him a question.
We don't shadow ban on Twitter.
I went to Twitter.
The entire system was built to shadow ban.
I mean, they couldn't show me everything because there were privacy settings.
But every page that I was allowed to see about how the system ran was, oh, you talked to this person.
This person talked to this person.
This person said this word.
And here's the system that we're going to de-boost this.
And they couldn't even figure out what the full code around that was.
As Elon said to me, it was a fractal Rube Goldberg machine.
Like, that's how complex the thing was.
Nobody, none of the engineers really understood what it was.
But I would say that Elon has now repeatedly said that you are the media.
And that's us.
And that is true.
Think about it this way.
Now try to imagine it the other way.
Okay, if ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, throw in a couple others, if they all went down for 24 hours, we'd be free.
Holy cow!
You know what I mean?
We'd be out there having a drink.
unidentified
We'd know the real story.
dave rubin
You're right, exactly.
But really, think about that.
So the entire mainstream layer, if it went away tomorrow, you all laughed at that joke for a reason.
If it went away tomorrow, we'd all basically be okay.
And if anything, we'd probably be better off because it has done such a negligent job of what its mission was supposed to be.
If Twitter, the place where it's literally everything, if that went away, we would almost have no touch points that we could agree on.
Or figure out how to get news or anything else.
And by the way, I hope, I don't know this for sure, I know Elon a little bit, I hope he's working on all of the ways to make sure that that doesn't happen.
Because Twitter X, in some sense, is the biggest weapon that we have against the machine, whatever you want to call that corporate layer.
david desrosiers
It's like Starleap for you.
dave rubin
It is, and he also owns Starloam, so that's pretty good.
That might be one way that they can't take it out.
I would say just very quickly on the, on the point of what happens if the alt media media sort of takes over the mainstream media, do we become the corporate media?
Well, a, I would say largely that's happened.
As I said before, Rogan is bigger than CNN fact.
If I was pulling in the numbers that I said, you know, that MSNBC is getting, I would look for another job.
So, So, that has happened already, but that being said, everyone's got a boss at the end of the day.
I mean, I went independent very early.
It's why I started a tech company, to help other people go independent.
But as long as I'm on YouTube, yeah, I can still be demonetized.
And if you're demonetized enough, well, that's a soft type of censorship.
And you might say, okay, well, now I can't make a living.
I guess I'm just not going to talk about that controversial thing any.
So until we're all totally technologically free, whatever you Whatever that really means, whether this is all done completely decentralized, I mean there's all sorts of conversations around all that, and all of our commerce is done decentralized and everything else, and we're not there yet on some of these things, obviously.
Then yes, if you have a job in essence, you have a master.
I think the best thing that you could do, as I've got my producer and my director here, is what we try to do on the show every day, which is I Try to tell the truth the best that I can.
And if I screw something up, we try to address it.
And then over time, you build some cred.
And that's why I think it's so funny.
You know, Jake Tapper, who was brought in, he was at ABC, chief White House correspondent at ABC before working at CNN.
And he was pretty decent.
He was thought of as sort of this moderate, you know, people didn't know what his politics are, and that's the way he was supposed to be.
Jake Tapper then became basically a Democrat operative at CNN, and as I'm sure some of you guys know, he has a book coming out next month laying out how the scandal around Biden's cognitive decline happened.
And it's like, Jake, you were running cover for this thing for years.
How dare you?
Anyone else could.
Joe Biden should write the book.
Or you should write it.
But that's how...
But that's how they do it.
They somehow have a way still.
There is still something intrinsically built into the Matrix that they can pull off the trick, lie about it, and then still profit from it on the other side.
So we're going through that change right now.
And it's a generational thing, too.
A certain set of people, largely the Boomer generation, is just used to watching television box.
And it was like that.
And now it's completely changed.
And there's going to be some tension and some rough waters as we get to the other stuff.
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david desrosiers
If there's another problem, I think that kind of runs through kind of the censorship of our conversation.
It's this recognition that there has to be a public conversation.
If you follow the logic, like, I think one of the things that the left has always done to its best talent on the right, it was saying, you have all these people on X, go build a business, monetize them, and no one else will hear from you again.
Right, so I I think making you guys like in some respects hot house flower Successes is a way of actually keeping you guys in the box Yeah So I mean in the very least if there's just one place where it is like the best of all the hot houses can come Just make exceptions for me, I don't care.
dave rubin
Very quick on that point, I don't know if you guys saw it, but just this week, Media Matters, which is a far-left non-profit, they ran this giant exposé on alt-media.
And they were basically saying alt-media is all of these right-wingers, and it was Rogan and Ben Shapiro and me, and that it was comedians like E.O. Vaughan, and just this wild mix of people.
Nobody buys this anymore.
So everyone that I saw on Twitter talking about it was like, well, this is just nonsense because you guys made us.
The only reason the alt-media is thought of as right-leaning is because we were just the counter to the thing that you guys created.
So that's the asymmetry right now, and we have to just keep going and building and innovating to make sure they get it.
david desrosiers
You got the brofaternity.
Yeah, exactly.
sarah steele
One final one from me and then I'll open it up to you all.
I think the campus conversation has a different level of urgency than the one in the public square.
Part of our mission at the Salient, that reason why we feel so passionately about our work, is because whether people like it or not, Harvard is graduating America's next leaders.
There's a pipeline from Harvard to Washington, D.C., just for example.
Abby Phillip, a favorite on CNN, is a Harvard graduate who's come back to campus.
dave rubin
Talk about her expertise and anything I'm sorry, Abby Phillips went to Harvard our new line on the show with her is that she is the dumbest person on television She looks like she's staring into the nothing the entire I can't believe she like it makes perfect sense nonetheless You know,
sarah steele
I think nonetheless We're trying to navigate within the establishment to the best of our ability at Harvard.
And there's a certain given, for example, the salient, I mentioned at the start of this, had a moment where we didn't know if the administration was going to say, or professors were going to say, you know, you're going to be banned from the dorms.
But we understood that the only way out was to work with them, that we couldn't circumvent them within the context of Harvard.
So given kind of that She thinks sharply of America's youth and also the kind of unavoidable contact that you have with established organizations.
What hope do you have for the potential reformation or restoration of some of these institutions?
I'm thinking in particular of big changes in the big tech atmosphere in terms of the censorship, you know,
in Zuckerberg I'm I'm
david desrosiers
bullish for free voices on Ivy League campuses.
So I think you guys have been suffering behind the ivory curtains for a long time.
That October 7th, they held up their iPhones and showed that what Bill Gates was to the iPhone, Bill Ayers was to them.
This is the new The American mind going forward is the Palestinian, right?
And I think that's something you should be able to stand up and make that contrast.
Do it in the Harvard way.
But make your peace with your tech billionaires who you're along with, right?
It seems like Ackman got woke by October 7th, right?
It seems like people are waking up Show that best example.
Find people who are trustees and alumni and stop investing in really the death of the experiment.
Federalist One starts with, we're founding something based on reflection and choice.
This is an experiment in self-government.
These universities were feeder schools for Jefferson, not for this, this madness.
And to the degree that we don't take it back, we lose it.
Right? There's a great election.
You just talk about the Overton window going shut now and half way open.
The pipeline from really pre-K to PhD is completely billed as.
Right? And it's like, what happens is some of our best schools have like outliers like you guys.
And I believe in the outlier because if you have a fortune that's corrupted, the best thing you can do is plant A healthy treat.
And when those roots touch, things change.
But I'm a big fan of what you're doing.
I want to publish you guys.
Maybe I can sit back and share it with Bill Buckley someday.
But I think there's real greatness in the Ivies.
There's real greatness in Harvard.
There's real greatness in you.
And we've got to get behind it.
We've got to fund it.
And this is something I would kind of say.
It's like, once upon a time, Bill Aires lost.
They all went to the university.
They licked their wounds and they educated our kids.
Right? And now we're looking at the idea that they own the future.
All the best kids, all in the commanding heights, all think like you.
Right? And if we want to actually save our country to bring it back, we have to have a loan replacement theory.
Right? And it has to be supportive.
But it's like, we have to do it back better.
The only way to overturn a bad idea is to put a better idea in its place.
I think supporting what you're doing, but supporting the Ivies, keeping that kind of Robbie George, kind of salient beachhead going.
RDC minus, maybe.
But it's really good that the students get it, right?
That even without all the teachers, they know they've got to bring a better game.
It's probably a credit to your parents.
Are they in the room?
dave rubin
I can answer that very clearly.
I mean, the billionaires are not going to save us.
No. Are there great billionaires?
Yeah. Has Elon done something?
I mean, we just laid it out.
Has he done something that has completely freed us from the corporate overlords, at least at the moment?
Of course.
And by the way, as I said, his line is, you are an idiot.
The line is, I'm an idiot.
So he has done something to democratize this in an incredible way.
There are others.
Peter Thiel, who you mentioned, has been ahead of virtually everything ever since he's been in public life.
I mean, even before that, when he was doing the Stanford Review, you know, 30-something years ago at this point.
David Sachs, who's now the crypto AI czar, has been ahead of most of those bad trends.
I think he wrote that at the Stanford Review with Thiel.
But they're not gonna save us.
First off, as a general rule, I don't believe in top-down systems over time, right?
Humans are meant to organize organically, bottom-up, and that's the best way for people to do things that will protect the individual, and the individual, of course, is the smallest minority, and the thing that we should care about most in a society of 350 million people.
So we have to just figure out how to innovate better, Alright, well...
And I think that that is right.
That is what we've done.
And it clearly has not worked.
But the white pill version of that is...
That it is now brought together almost everyone.
It's hard to see.
It's really hard to see because of some of the things we've discussed here with social media and the way that mainstream media is collapsing.
But most Americans, I would venture to say it's about 80% of Americans, Actually, I'm on the same team, and it might even be more than that.
I really believe that.
They have their own cultural beliefs, they have their own religious beliefs, they might have their own beliefs on taxation and abortion, and all those things.
But they think that this experiment is fundamentally good, they know why they came here, or their grandparents and great-grandparents, in my case, came here, and they do believe that that is fundamentally good.
So while we are slammed endlessly With the hysteria at Columbia and now watching people literally blow up Teslas on the street because the guys saved astronauts the other day.
It's all very confusing why they're doing this.
That is a very specific sliver of people that we have to figure out how to address them properly and understand that, but then realize that the rest of us really do want to be part of this broad American experiment and strengthen Excellent.
sarah steele
All right, I'd love to open it up to questions.
You can just raise your hand and I'll pick on people.
I saw you move first.
dave rubin
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unidentified
So, what are the issues I'm having institutionally now?
So, I'm a Wharton grad, my middle son to Wharton grad, my abitual son to Cornell grad.
Frank Lee, but when Penn brought the pro-Palestinian writers forum
to the university, and the DP, you know, went along, and I used to write for the DP back in the 1980s on the youngest boom or whatever, but it was frightening to me to see the institutional knowledge that has basically been passed down in a very narrow microcosm of this is what our institution stands for,
My little son tried to start in finance and started the FinTech Club at Wharton, and they said, we can't fund you because you're not a minority.
And yet he, all his members, took him to the entire university.
So there is a bias against anyone wanting to do greater good.
When the Writer's Forum came, and there was a DP article written by Mark Rowan, Who criticized what the university was doing, D.C. refused to publish that.
It turned out that he then had to go to CNN and he had to go to CNBC and he had to blast out what was happening at the university.
And it's frankly frightening that the college newspapers that are supposed to be for free speech and supposed to allow for your freedom of thought I mean, I think you just captured something I
david desrosiers
would coin as adjacency corporatives.
Like, you have people, like, who just exist.
to come out and say, there's a cause, we all support this cause, we don't support that cause.
Right? And you have to be very powerful.
How many people can get, you know, call Mark Hoffman and, you know, CNBC, say, Mark, they shut me down, no one shuts me down.
Right? That's how the IVs controlled, and that's how they transformed, they took the billiard students, and they made them into sitting in all the chairs of the commanding heights.
To the degree where they own the alphabet soup companies that in the 60s when Nixon was looking at and pushing, the silent majority was pushing it back.
They own all of those too.
And it's because your school system has become a feeder school of the natural aristocracy of America, right?
And if there's something that I could leave you with, I was at a conversation and this guy Richard Epstein, I don't know if you've ever heard of that guy, he speaks for a living, and he just, he was talking, he said, He's telling a story about how he had a conversation with Jamie Dimon.
And Jamie Dimon was like, I just hire all these best and brightest from everywhere.
They come from Dartmouth.
They come from Penn.
They come from Wharton.
And it's like, none of them want to actually lend money to anybody who's building a pipe for National Gas.
They hate cigarettes.
And they want to push ESG, right?
And then this guy, Richard Epstein, he says, maybe you should hire people from Texas A&M.
I do think there has to be a mental shift, where people who are outside, who are graduates and alumni, that are in the markets, got to stop actually entitling stupid.
They might have to go to Texas A&M before they can get someone from the Wart Regal.
dave rubin
I would just add to that quickly, we just need to think about these things in a new way.
We have a running joke on my show, my last three hires are all college dropouts.
My executive producer was my intern.
And he's a college dropout.
unidentified
Good for you.
dave rubin
Yeah. No, I have a PhD in science.
that now me as a father have to think about what do I want to do with my kids for preschool because they might be taught they're both boys that they're girls like the layers of this have just become so deeply infected that I would say That's great.
For generations, it was just like the factory.
Like, you go to public school, you'll basically get out, you'll go to college, you'll basically get out, you'll work in the corporate environment, you'll basically get out, you'll have a house in the suburbs and everything else.
And now the world is just going to look very, very different.
And again, that really is the opportunity for the people that are, you know, going to do the best.
unidentified
So, I think everyone will agree that the written media, New York Times, Washington Post, New York Post, kind of attract different audiences and I don't know what the technical regulations are regarding the reporting.
Obviously, cable media has their own biases, but when things change for mainstream media, BBC, NBC, when they're regulated by the FCC, their stations are regulated, when do they start to I'll give you the short answer and then you can probably give a more in-depth history answer.
dave rubin
The short answer is that Trump's first time around completely blew everything apart.
Whatever degree or sort of patina of decency or moderation that they had was completely ripped off of that.
Because we could uncover.
I mean, I always go back to the very fine people hoax from Charlottesville that I mentioned before, because it was incredible to watch that Main Street.
Barack Obama, the day before this election, so in November of 24, was giving a speech for Kamala and said it again.
So if you're Barack Obama, what do you do?
Either you don't know, and I think a lot of things about Barack Obama, but I don't think he's dumb.
So, Barack Obama knew the key, but he thought, boy, these people are so freaking stupid still.
The amount of voters out there, and it's like, I need about 50 million voters or something like that.
unidentified
These people are still so dumb now.
dave rubin
They are so uneducated and ridiculous, and I know Kamala thinks that black people don't know how to use computers or something, but like, she really, he really thought that to the point that he could throw that lie out there.
And now it didn't work anymore.
So that really is, that is the hope now, that enough people have woke up and that eventually the liars will just, it just won't get traction anymore.
That's the other reason their community notes on Twitter has been so great.
Because we're finally fact-checking people in real time.
And that's probably just, we're probably at like letter A of the full alphabet of the way that they will evolve community notes to make it more appropriate.
But maybe on the history part of that.
david desrosiers
I mean, I think the historical footnote is In 2016, two things happened that shook the world.
It was Donald Trump and Brexit.
And that was the day that the media broke.
That was the day that I think corporate media stood up and said, no more.
And they introduced Orwellian speak of mis, dis, and malinformation.
unidentified
And we have been living in that world since then.
david desrosiers
And I think we need to shake it off.
unidentified
And we're still there.
david desrosiers
Oh, you're going to be there for a long time?
Yeah. In the university, probably for another 60 years.
unidentified
So I have a question that I keep wondering and I never really get an answer to.
Do you know anyone on the left who wakes up and actually says out loud, maybe this isn't what I signed up to do when I had to become a journalist?
Like, why isn't there one person ever really?
Because there's so many journalists.
There's so many journalists on the left.
Journalism is this, like, wonderfully respected thing, especially if you're, like, over the age of 35, and remember when your journalists were great.
Yeah. Where are these people?
Like, how is there no one?
Do you know anyone?
dave rubin
Well, it tells you the power of what you think, really.
That's what you're talking about.
Because every time I say journalists on my show, I have to go like, yes, they're journalists.
They're air-quote journalists.
There are very, very few.
You mentioned the New York Post.
unidentified
The New York Post does a pretty good job of journalists.
dave rubin
David can talk about some of the other institutions that do it, but most of these people are activists.
The New York Times about five years ago ran a cover story that Jordan Peterson, Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, me, And Ben Shapiro were the leaders of the alt-right.
I mean, really try to think how insane...
unidentified
What an asshole!
It's always nice to be mentioned in the same sentence as Thomas Sowell.
dave rubin
But, like, that's the level of insanity that nobody there seems to be able to stop.
I would say the clearest thing I can say about this is that Jordan, who I think is the best public intellectual that we have in the world, and in some sense he's more of a prophet, I would say, than a public intellectual, For years he was going to D.C. and he was talking to Congressional Democrats and Senators and media people about the question he would always ask them is, when does the left go too far?
And he could never get anyone to answer.
So nobody could answer that.
Right? There's many ways.
Okay, you've gone too far when you block students from entering campus.
You've gone too far to tell boys that they're girls.
We could do a laundry list of things, right?
But he could never get anyone to say it.
And I think that because of their subjective view of the world, I think there's probably religious and philosophical and existential reasons connected to all of that, that has led to journalists thinking that I'm not supposed to report on the world of how it is.
I'm supposed to report, I'm supposed to confuse people so that the world will become the way I want it to be.
And I don't think it's more complex than that, actually.
And there's very, very few And by the way, if you become one of the ones who does wake up, and I was on the left so I know a little bit about waking up, you are then enemy number one.
They will hate you way more than they're going to hate Ben Shapiro or Dennis Prager or Larry Elder or some standard Republican or Conservative.
But now you're the traitor and they've really got to take you out.
So I think there's societal pressures, there's social pressures, they throw good open bar parties.
david desrosiers
But there's so many, you've found your piece.
unidentified
You went.
dave rubin
Yeah, I did it.
It's better out looking sad.
david desrosiers
I would just add to that this, you know, getting back, if you really want to make, you know, progressivism, America great again, you have to make progressives liberal again.
Like Bill Keller at the New York Times, I think I'm getting it right, all of a sudden, you know, right after Trump came, it's when Trump broke the media, when they just said one day, You know what, we've always tried to play this Max Weber, fact, value, distinction game.
Like, we can't do it anymore.
We're actually coming out from being advocates, you know, in advocacy journalism.
I think you have to step back from that.
And it's like, it's certainly time to step back.
I don't, if we don't step back from that, it's just, it's just stupid tribalism.
And it's not, it's not going to help.
It's not going to heal our country.
unidentified
I see.
Trump is currently doing about 120% of what anyone reasonably would expect him to do to fight wokeness, but it's all through executive orders, which can be undone by future Democratic presidents.
There's really only two ways to make this reasonably permanent legislation, or better yet, Supreme Court decisions.
To what extent do you think Trump is going to be successful in making these reforms more permanent?
dave rubin
Well, I would say there's one other way, which is through a Cultural revolution.
Most revolutions are bloody, and hopefully this one doesn't have to be bloody.
So that, I don't like that, in some sense, in like a purely philosophical sense.
I don't like doing everything by executive action.
I didn't like when Obama did it.
I don't like when Republicans do it.
So I agree with the notion that you're putting out there.
But I would say he's done so much so fast, as you just said, 120%.
He's just plowing through everything.
And somehow it still works.
I mean, it's really incredible what this guy is doing, right?
He's doing so much at once.
The world is so fundamentally different.
You know, we're getting closer to a settlement with Russia and Ukraine.
It does seem like the Middle East thing will have some culmination problem.
I would guess within six months to a year.
Clearly, everything that's happening with Doge, we can do the list of things, all of the woke stuff, right?
And if you can have four years of doing a lot, even if it's partly not exactly the way we want it done, And I know there's a slippery slope argument here, because it could be reversed on the other side.
If the culture can change enough that it's like, boy, we really did get that close to the end, and the culture fully shifts, and our movies shift, and our TV shows shift, and what's cool shifts, and we can make...
david desrosiers
When's the last time you heard a new song?
dave rubin
It's been a long time, right?
Like, if we can really fix the culture, then the next president that comes in, even if it's a Democrat, We'll have to deal with that baggage.
So I know that's not perfect sort of political answer, but as Breitbart said, politics is downstream psychology.
david desrosiers
And I'd like to say, it's like Trump gets on the green in one shot with an executive order.
And he has to sink the ball if he wants to keep it.
But I do think it's kind of part of a shock and awe kind of approach towards politics.
The other side sees it as shock and awful.
Right? But he does set the standard.
He does that 80-20 divide.
And I think, you know, if he doesn't push it legislatively, he doesn't make it real, it's not real.
It can be reversed.
But I do think that it's...
Everybody thinks that this is the only tool in his box.
And I think he knows how to...
unidentified
Alright, one more question from the...
Sure. Um, I want to go back to something Dave said earlier, which, um, Dave mentioned that the love has, in fact, reality in media.
And then the ad that Todd has is an analogy.
And that's an analogy about you and your road to being with people on a human level.
And that really spurred, you know, this big conservative movement.
And so then, he went on to talk about AI.
Quite well made.
And so I'm finding that in different industries, nothing to do with this, people are already in the RIPT.
And if they're only a faction, they think about it.
And so my question is, how do you imagine that human faction that being so special and so famous, how does that array so that it doesn't come to the cycle of the fundraising model of the RIPT?
dave rubin
What if you found out right now I was the AI version of me?
It's a great question.
As I said, 15 years from now, the world is going to look so fundamentally different.
So many of the jobs that we all have, and I think that includes talk show hosts, are going to be gone.
It's not just, you know, the thing that people are talking about now is, OK, we can bring in a certain set.
The Democrats keep saying we need all these immigrants because they're going to pick our fruit, which is a horrific argument because it's basically saying we're going to have this indentured servitude layer forever.
But they're being replaced by robots now.
It is happening now.
And then you'll have brought all these people into the country and then these people won't have jobs and will need to be on the, you know, on the government dole and paid for by everybody else.
Everything is going to change.
So the best thing that you can do, I think really the only way I can answer that question, is you can be as authentic as you can possibly be for as long as you can possibly do it.
But that's not just for what I do for a living.
That's literally for whatever you do for a living or anyone in this room, whether you're a researcher or a shoe salesman or a ditch digger or whatever it might be.
Do it to the best of your ability.
In the most authentic way possible, and I think that spurs on good things.
I would also, just one other thing, I mean, I'm a big sci-fi guy.
Much of my politics is based on the Matrix and, you know, that the machines are going to turn on in Skynet and Scanner Darkly and, you know, Precourt, Minority Report, and all these things.
Seinfeld. Seinfeld.
I don't think it's sci-fi, but a lot of it did come from that, too.
So I'm very aware of this place that we're in.
You know, it feels like in every sci-fi movie you can watch, AI, the movie AI, or any book by Isaac Asimov, there's always this weird moment right before everything bad happens where everybody's like, you know, this bad thing's going to happen.
The robots are going to turn on it.
And it seems like we're sort of in that moment right now.
Everyone's like, what the hell is happening here?
We're all turning to AI instead of, you know, Googling things and Grok and all these things.
And it's like, I don't know, is Grok giving me exactly what the truth is?
Like, we're outsourcing a lot of the sanity and the reality.
So we're in that moment right now, and it's going to be different for all of us.
That really is the answer.
You will have to have a relationship What do you need from us?
sarah steele
Oh, thanks for the tee-up.
unidentified
I appreciate it.
sarah steele
I appreciate it.
You know, I think...
First, if I could just explain a little bit more about what the Salient does at Harvard.
That'll get us going in the right direction.
So, the Salient was founded in 1981.
It began as a Reunited Planet Action Project in 1994.
I've sensed that at that time that perhaps that was the last time at Harvard where socially, culturally on campus, you could like kind of flaunt your Republican-ness and you wouldn't be counted for it, right?
And printed consistently up until actually some ambiguous time in the Obama era.
And perhaps if it's right before 2016, we have to dig through alumni archives to actually figure out precisely when the salient went out of print.
But it was very unfortunate that it did, because at that point, campus was a total progressive vacuum, right?
There was no conservative voice at Harvard.
And we had, you know, for example, Professor Harvey Mansfield was teaching a great political science class, but outside of the classroom, most of the students What we perceive is like the real campus conversation is happening in the dining halls.
It's happening in the dorms.
unidentified
It's not necessarily strictly in the classroom.
sarah steele
So we are very, very grateful that in 2021 the salient came back into print.
We print six issues per semester.
They're lying all around the gallery today.
So Please grab a copy before you go.
Each issue's got like 10 to 15 articles themed around a particular subject, and we ask our writers to articulate a conservative perspective or viewpoint.
Fully flesh out pen to paper, which I know that sounds weird from a college perspective, like that, you know, or doesn't everyone just type everything up today and use AI to get their brainstorm ideas out?
But the Salient team does it the old-fashioned way.
We want to put our ideas down and present them in print in front of our peers, and hence the distribution stuff that I mentioned at the start of the evening.
So right now, I think the answer for Harvard is, you know, there's a lot of top-down How much does it cost to run one of these?
ultimately the sailing actually in the red booklets we have our budget and everything disclosed.
unidentified
You can do a lot with a loop.
sarah steele
We are looking to build a conservative institution at Harvard.
It's not just about being a think tank, right?
Like it's not just about writing and transcribing, which we do with a ton of pride, but it's also about creating that grassroots campus culture where the students feel that debate is the norm again, where they can go to their friend with, you know, a super conservative idea and not be socially out So that is our work on campus.
It happens slowly, as do most grassroots things, but I would say from the student perspective, this is one of the best ways to truly reform schools like Harvard.
And for what it's worth, whether you're an alumni or not, it Harvard is the city on the hill in terms of the broader Ivy League.
I do sense that the media loves to sink its teeth into Harvard.
When we have good news, we also want to spread it to folks so that they know that when a positive decision is made at Harvard, that other schools can follow in that wake.
And we certainly have sensed that so far.
We, outside of publishing, have events going on constantly.
We actually have a headquarters that costs us a pretty penny.
It's about 80K of rent a year in Harvard Square.
But we started renting it out to friendly student groups.
So we have a bipartisan debate society who rents out from us.
We have a Catholic reading group and a Protestant reading group and a church reading group, actually.
And it's all this kind of like extracurricular campus activity that you think would happen by default, but doesn't happen unless they feel this like comfort, you know, friendly space.
So, in these packets that are lying around, there's some right by the door.
I'd love it if you grab one.
We need your support more than anything.
david desrosiers
And this is your spring break?
sarah steele
And make sure before you leave that you say hello to me and a bunch of the salient team members around.
If they look under 21, they probably are.
And make sure you talk to our team members because as far as Harvard students go, I'm slightly older as a student.
I'm 30. I took a long leave and then returned.
These were the only students at Harvard that I wanted to hang out with, and I wanted to spend time with, because I just immediately was hit over the head with how brilliant these conservative Harvard students are.
Any last words, John?
david desrosiers
Thank you.
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