Episode 500: What a Long Strange Trip it's Been | Dave Rubin AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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Episode: Episode 500: What a Long Strange Trip it's Been | Dave Rubin

Author: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Duration: 01:32:49

Episode Shownotes

Jordan Peterson sits down with Dave Rubin to take a retrospective look back on over a decade of “The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.” They discuss going on tour together, how Dave supported Jordan through his worst days, how podcasting broke the mainstream media, the lessons learned across 500 episodes, the

bright future following America’s vote for sanity, and how the adventure of our lives has only just begun. Here’s to the next 500 - onward and upward! Dave Rubin is the host of The Rubin Report, a top-ranking talk show with over one billion views and millions of subscribers. The Rubin Report is recognized as one of the most influential spaces for uncensored conversations about politics, culture, comedy, current events, and more. Rubin began his career in New York City as a stand-up comedian. He continues to perform throughout the United States and Europe utilizing his voice to illuminate the absurdities of the culture’s polarized political landscape. He accompanied Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on an international speaking tour where they addressed hundreds of thousands of people across three continents. In an effort to combat big tech censorship, Rubin founded Locals.com, a subscription-based digital platform that empowers creators to be independent by giving them control over their content and data. Locals.com has amassed tens of millions of users since its inception in 2019. Rubin sold the platform to Rumble in 2021 which went public in 2022. Dave is a two-time New York Times best-selling author. This episode was filmed on November 14th, 2024

Summary

In the 500th episode of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, Dr. Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin reflect on their decade-long journey of podcasting and its transformative impact on media. They explore the significance of storytelling in shaping human experiences and emphasize personal growth, particularly through parenthood and responsibility. The discussion includes insights on maturity, sacrifice, and the consequences of blaming external factors for personal challenges, using Cain's narrative as a stark example. They also critique the failures of mainstream media and highlight the emergence of new media platforms, optimistic about future political and societal shifts.

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Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_01
If you say the truth and nothing else. You'll have an immense adventure as a consequence.

00:00:10 Speaker_00
Jordan Peterson said it first. That's somewhat of an existential crisis. Oh my God! To get yourself out of trouble, you're going to come on my podcast. That's the adventure of our life. I'm going to put my story on, babe.

00:00:19 Speaker_01
Life is a constant process of death and rebirth. Why is it a horror show? You're toying with the dark side. Wake up! It's not bravery. I know what to be afraid of.

00:00:28 Speaker_01
And I'm nowhere near as afraid of the people who would want to compel my language as I am afraid of the consequences of not saying what I have to say.

00:00:35 Speaker_00
Do you wrestle with God?

00:00:37 Speaker_01
It with every word. It's a bit of a special occasion today, at least as far as I'm concerned, and maybe for some of you. It's the 500th episode of my podcast. And so that's a lot of podcasts.

00:00:57 Speaker_01
That's a lot of water under the bridge and a lot of learning. And I have as my guest today, my friend and compatriot, Dave Rubin. And we had the opportunity to take a walk down memory lane. Dave, was one of the first podcast notables.

00:01:19 Speaker_01
back in 2016 to bring the concerns that I was discussing in Canada to a broader international audience. And out of that initial encounter came a friendship and then a joint tour. I was on tour with Dave throughout 2018.

00:01:39 Speaker_01
We went to, we can't even remember, 150 different cities, maybe 200, a lot, a lot of places, a lot of water under the bridge.

00:01:49 Speaker_01
talked to hundreds of thousands of people and we've both been at the center of the podcast revolution, the new media revolution, the inevitable demise of the legacy media.

00:02:04 Speaker_01
And we sat down today to remember that and to sort it out and to make sense of it and to be thrilled about it in all sorts of ways. And so Join us for an evaluation of the radically strange trip that the last eight years has been.

00:02:26 Speaker_01
Well, Mr. Rubin, turns out that you're here for the 500th episode of my podcast.

00:02:32 Speaker_03
I was told this is the last episode.

00:02:35 Speaker_01
Is that not true? Well, it depends on whether or not the world comes to an end now that Trump's been elected.

00:02:40 Speaker_03
I think things are looking up, man. Things are looking really up right now. Had it gone the other way, this might have been the last podcast.

00:02:46 Speaker_01
Yeah, definitely. We'll walk down that avenue, no doubt. So I'm gonna start, I'm gonna give you this book. So this is obviously an unashamed promo, but this is coming out this week. So I'd like you to have it.

00:03:04 Speaker_04
I'm thrilled, thank you. Yeah, you bet. I appreciate that. You churn these out like nobody. I mean, you really do. Yeah, well, I'm... That's your wrestling with God, writing these things, I think.

00:03:16 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah, definitely.

00:03:19 Speaker_04
Are you happy with this one?

00:03:20 Speaker_01
Yes. It's more difficult than the last two books that I wrote. It's a little bit more demanding on the reader, I would say. But it's less demanding than Maps of Meaning.

00:03:36 Speaker_01
But I'm very curious to see what sort of impact it has because now that we know that we see the world through a story, we better get the story straight. And that's what I'm trying to do with this book.

00:03:49 Speaker_01
And so one of the things I figured out, which I think is extremely useful to know, is that there's converging evidence from multiple disciplines that we see the world through a story.

00:04:03 Speaker_01
That what a story is, is actually a description of the way that someone prioritizes their attention and their actions. Right?

00:04:10 Speaker_01
So when you go see a movie, you see the person who's acting, the protagonist, the hero, you see what he attends to, and so you see how he rank orders his priorities, and then of course you see the same thing with regards to his actions, and you infer his frame of reference, and then you can occupy his value frame, and you can see the world through his eyes.

00:04:29 Speaker_01
And human beings are very good at that. We're very good at seeing the world through other people's eyes. That's even why our eyes have evolved the way they've evolved.

00:04:38 Speaker_01
Because our eyes are maximally visible so that we can see what other people are looking at, so that we can infer the value structure that's directing their attention and we can occupy the same emotional and motivational space as they do.

00:04:54 Speaker_01
Human beings are unbelievably good at that. You have to prioritize your attention, because there's too many things to attend to. And you prioritize your attention by weighting the things that you interact with.

00:05:08 Speaker_01
Some things you attend to, some things you don't. That's a 1-0 weighting, essentially. And there's gradations of that weighting. Anyways, the way we communicate about these weighting strategies is with stories.

00:05:21 Speaker_01
So once you know that, the only question becomes, well, what's the story then? What is it? What should it be? Right? And the postmodernist insistence is that the story is one of power. And I don't think that's true because power is self-devouring.

00:05:37 Speaker_01
It can't sustain itself, or it can only sustain itself with force. And part of the problem with that is that if you use power, someone more powerful will definitely take you out. And you also don't get the best out of people when you compel them.

00:05:53 Speaker_01
So they're not efficient strategies. They backfire. And you could say there's no story that's canonical, but then you fall into the nihilist hell and that's not useful.

00:06:05 Speaker_01
And you could say that the story is one of sexuality and hedonism, but if you orient your life in that direction, you'll end up alone. And so, That's another self-devouring story.

00:06:18 Speaker_01
And so one of the insistences in the biblical narrative is that the fundamental story of the community is one of sacrifice. And I think technically it has to be true because to enter into a relationship with someone, you have to sacrifice.

00:06:35 Speaker_01
You sacrifice your own centrality, right? Well, you have kids. So what's the consequence of that for your story?

00:06:44 Speaker_03
Wow, you're going hard right from the beginning. Well, first off, I should note that you were integral in me having kids because we were on tour back in 2018. Did something like 120 shows, 20 some odd countries, bouncing around.

00:07:00 Speaker_03
We were just saying right before the cameras started rolling that it was so much smaller. We had no idea what we were doing in some sense.

00:07:07 Speaker_03
You knew what you were doing on stage, and I was making some jokes, and we'd do the Q&A together, but there was no security, there was no managers, there was no entourage, there was no film crew.

00:07:17 Speaker_03
I mean, we really were just out there bouncing around doing things. And one of the things that you were saying almost every night, and the thing that You know, I've said this to you many times.

00:07:27 Speaker_03
There's a million things, obviously, that everyone can say about Jordan Peterson.

00:07:30 Speaker_03
But one of the things that watching you as someone on stage, to the extent that you're a performer, do is that you would basically do an hour, hour and a half lecture every night and then just pick it up the next night where you left off.

00:07:42 Speaker_03
Except I was basically, me and the tour manager, were the only two people that saw it the night before. You know, we didn't have roadies going to every show. But one of the things that you consistently talked about is the need for people to truly

00:07:55 Speaker_03
For almost everyone, you would say, to live a fully actualized life is to have a child, to learn what the experience of being a parent is, and then ultimately a grandparent, and maybe a great grandparent, that that's just so integral to being a fully fledged human.

00:08:12 Speaker_03
And I'm hearing you do this night after night. And David, my husband, who you know, he's a little younger than me. He grew up in a time where he just thought he was gonna get married. It wasn't a thing. I'm a child of the eighties.

00:08:23 Speaker_03
It was gay marriage, whatever else. And I struggled with all that. And we've done that on camera before. So I don't think we have to rehash that too much. But I grew up in a time not thinking I would get married.

00:08:33 Speaker_03
I never really thought of anything to the future really. And I kind of just put everything towards my career. And now I've got David, who I'm FaceTiming with every night, whatever country, and telling me he wants kids.

00:08:44 Speaker_03
And I've got you on stage telling 10,000 people every night why they should have kids. And finally, I thought, man, if I don't do this, there's really something wrong with me. I'm with the person I'm supposed to be with.

00:08:57 Speaker_03
I'm touring with someone that I think has offered more to the world. terms of how do we do this right than anyone that I could possibly imagine. And I get the privilege of being part of that. If I can't do this, then this thing's really on me.

00:09:11 Speaker_03
So we've got two two-year-olds now and Justin's middle name is Jordan, which one of the great joys of my life was calling you up that day and asking you if we could do it. And we got the Jordan Peterson tears, which we've gotten every now and again.

00:09:24 Speaker_03
And so what that has done to me, I mean, I mean, the best example I can tell you is Luke was about two months old one night, you know, coughing terribly, really nasal and just gunky.

00:09:40 Speaker_01
Sick babies are so much fun.

00:09:43 Speaker_03
But so, you know, a couple hours of trying to get him better and doing everything we could and steam and calling the grandmothers and what do we do, what do we do? And finally, and calling the doctor.

00:09:52 Speaker_03
And finally we were like, we have to take him to the hospital and to be driving to that hospital, you know, with him, in the car for the first time since we had taken him home from the hospital when he was born, and literally talking to God.

00:10:05 Speaker_03
I mean, I don't know how often I do that, probably not that often, and saying, take me. Like, it was just the thing, take me. Like, whatever's happening here, I could be done. Like, let me be done. And obviously, he's okay. But that, that's the thing.

00:10:20 Speaker_03
I think in essence, that's the reason that you're saying to really do it right. I mean, I've changed more in these two years and matured more and dealt with more of my stuff, whatever else was left, than it certainly at any point in my adult life.

00:10:37 Speaker_03
And I'm just at the beginning of that. I'm also 48. I have a lot of friends who have children that are mid-20s now. So think about that. My contemporaries, I'm hanging out with my friends from childhood. Two of my best friends are still,

00:10:50 Speaker_03
from five and eight years old, they've got kids out of college now. And I'm just bringing these children into the world and what that does to your perspective and change and everything else. So I would say the most powerful piece of it probably is

00:11:06 Speaker_03
there is something way more important than you. And when you wake up and see that, when I get up every morning and I'm making my coffee and those two kids run at me with like, the world is just, you talk about the eyes, like their eyes are open, man.

00:11:19 Speaker_03
And like, they just, they think- Yeah, and they think you are the best thing in the world. And I think about it all the time. I'm like, well, now it's on me to be the best thing that I can be.

00:11:30 Speaker_03
I don't know that I can be the best thing in the world, but I could be the best thing that I can be. And I'm really trying to do it. And actually, as I've tried to do it, it's becoming less difficult to do.

00:11:38 Speaker_03
You know, like eventually you start doing it right, and then it kind of works. I'm not saying it's perfect all the time.

00:11:43 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, you become what you practice.

00:11:44 Speaker_03
Yeah, and then it's on you.

00:11:45 Speaker_01
And what you aim for.

00:11:47 Speaker_03
Yeah, and aiming for that. I didn't realize I was aiming for it, I think.

00:11:51 Speaker_01
For what do you think now?

00:11:54 Speaker_03
Well, you said. Well, I don't think I realized I was aiming for something bigger than myself in some sense.

00:11:59 Speaker_03
You know, that it was just, I was going to, my career started working around the time that we were on tour, you know, six or so years ago, which feels like a lifetime ago. I just thought, I'll just do this and it's working and it's good.

00:12:14 Speaker_03
And that can really fill you up. You had this conversation on Bill Maher's podcast about that, that there are some people that maybe can do it.

00:12:22 Speaker_03
Maybe you don't have to get married and maybe you don't have to have kids and maybe you can put it all into your career or your art, but it's pretty damn rare. And I thought- And even then you get one dimensional, man.

00:12:32 Speaker_03
Well, you guys, I thought you took that conversation to as close as it could get on camera, probably, without going any further with him.

00:12:40 Speaker_03
And I think, and I don't want to talk about him too much, but I think he's maybe as close as you can get to doing that, for better or worse. I don't even mean that as a judgment call.

00:12:51 Speaker_01
You made an observation about the sacrificial element, telling that story about taking your son to the hospital, right? So your fervent wish was if you could swap places and take on the trouble, you'd do that in a second.

00:13:11 Speaker_03
It wasn't even a choice. It was just, that was it, obviously.

00:13:15 Speaker_01
Right, well, this is why I've said this and it's made me unpopular that people don't mature generally until they have a child. And the reason for that is you're not mature until someone's more important than you. And it has to be like that.

00:13:27 Speaker_01
It's like, no, there's no question. Right. There's no question. And it's weird, eh? Because so... One of the things that psychologists discovered, kind of by accident, using statistical investigation, so I think this is a very robust finding, is that

00:13:45 Speaker_01
all the negative emotion words clump together. So there's really one tree of negative emotion with the central trunk, right? So the negative emotions are grief and disappointment, frustration and anxiety and pain. Those are the big ones.

00:14:02 Speaker_01
Maybe they branch off into more differentiated emotions. One of the experiences that's integrally linked with negative emotion is self-consciousness.

00:14:16 Speaker_01
Self-consciousness is so tightly associated with negative emotion that they're not statistically distinguishable. There's no difference between being concerned with yourself and suffering.

00:14:26 Speaker_01
And that's such an interesting, it's such an unlikely reality that that's the case, you know, because the hedonistic story is that you can please yourself, and why shouldn't you please yourself?

00:14:40 Speaker_04
Fill it up forever.

00:14:41 Speaker_01
Well, the answer to that seems to be, well, first of all, who are you going to do that with? That's a real problem. It's a real problem, unless you can please yourself, and no one can.

00:14:52 Speaker_01
You know, we can punish the worst criminals by putting them in solitary. That's how social human beings are.

00:14:59 Speaker_01
And then, even more directly, the experience of self-consciousness, or to be concerned with yourself, is associated with anxiety and shame and grief and disappointment and all the negative emotions. And so, that implies then that there's a...

00:15:15 Speaker_01
non-obvious relationship between being focused on now exactly what? Focused on others? That's part of it. Focused on something higher? It's not, it's certainly not the narrow self and it's certainly not the whims of the self.

00:15:28 Speaker_03
No, it's building something that's well beyond you. The best I ever heard you talk about it was the closing speech you gave in Ark, which I think for the hundred some odd events we've done together, could be almost 200 events we've done at this point,

00:15:40 Speaker_03
where you talked about building Jacob's ladder and why you do it and what that is and how that is the link from man to God. That is right. I know that that is right. You know that's right. Why do you know it?

00:15:52 Speaker_03
Because it's not just that suddenly you have this magical moment of I'm driving to the hospital, take me, right? I just met this kid, right? He doesn't speak yet. I just met him, take me.

00:16:01 Speaker_03
I can tell you in the other parts of my life, I'm in better shape now in these last two years because I thought, well, now I have to live longer. I actually have to live longer.

00:16:11 Speaker_03
I play basketball every week with a bunch of guys who also have kids that are in their 20s and 30s. And then sometimes they bring their kids that are in 20s and 30s. So I'm talking about guys in their 50s and 60s. And I'm starting to play with them.

00:16:23 Speaker_03
And I was like, wait a minute, I want to be able to play with my sons. you know, they're 18. Well, if they're going to be 18, that's 16 years on me now. I got to be able to play when I'm 64.

00:16:32 Speaker_03
So then I started eating right and getting better and working out more and all of these things. And then, and that's, that sounds like it's all about me. Except when you start doing those things, David started doing those things.

00:16:45 Speaker_03
And then you've been to our house. We keep our house in a certain order and welcome people and share in the goodness that I suppose my career has been able to afford. So then you start building something that, well, my hands just went like that.

00:16:57 Speaker_03
You start building something that goes up. And I think that that's real and tangible and we all innately know it.

00:17:04 Speaker_01
I've been speaking with Jonathan Pazzo about these sorts of things quite a lot too. And so in this book, One of the stories that I tell is, or that I investigate, let's say, is the story of Abraham.

00:17:17 Speaker_01
So I'm going to tell you a little bit about that because it's, once you understand it, you'll never forget it. It's absolutely striking.

00:17:28 Speaker_01
So we talked about Jacob's ladder a little bit, so you think that there's this upward spiraling process that brings you to, what would you say, to more and more sophisticated Plateaus of unity something like that.

00:17:41 Speaker_01
Okay, so that's what the Abraham story is about.

00:17:43 Speaker_01
So when and and there's a pact made this is the covenant between Abraham and God so whatever's at that pinnacle of this ever ascending spiraling Value structure and process that's God whatever's at the pinnacle and it recedes as you approach it.

00:18:04 Speaker_01
So there's no there's no final God is ineffable in that way, right? So there's a never-ending spiral of up, just like there's a never-ending spiral of down. And so when Abraham, when the story opens, Abraham is a privileged infant, essentially.

00:18:25 Speaker_01
He's 70 years old, but he's never really had to lift a finger because he's wealthy. And so he has privilege in the modern language. And God comes to him as the spirit of adventure.

00:18:37 Speaker_01
And this is a definition of one of the facets of the highest plane of being, let's say. And God makes Abraham a deal, which is the covenant. And so the covenant is a contract.

00:18:50 Speaker_01
And so one of the proclamations of the biblical text is that human beings exist in a contractual relationship with the divine. That's a very interesting claim. And we exist in contractual relationships with each other.

00:19:04 Speaker_01
That's what a marriage is, obviously. And all of our business arrangements and friendships, although the details of the contract and the friendship are implicit, but they're still there. It's an understanding.

00:19:13 Speaker_01
So our essential mode of being in the world is contractual. And so God's contract with Abraham takes a very specific form. He says to Abraham, it's very well-defined. He says to Abraham, if you leave your zone of comfort,

00:19:29 Speaker_01
and you go out into the world and you put your heart into it, this is what I can offer. You'll be a blessing to yourself. So that's a good deal, right?

00:19:39 Speaker_01
Because part of the reason that people suffer is because they're wracked with self-doubt and guilt and lack of faith in themselves, whether that's deserved or undeserved.

00:19:51 Speaker_01
And sometimes it's undeserved and sometimes it's deserved, but they're not a blessing to themselves. They suffer more in consequence of their own being than for any other reason. Okay, so if you abide by the voice of adventure, then that disappears.

00:20:08 Speaker_01
Okay, so that's a good deal. And then the next part of the deal is you'll You'll do that in a manner that will bring you renown among other people and it'll be justified. So that's a good deal. So that's basically reputation, right?

00:20:24 Speaker_01
It's not fame, it's reputation. Those are different. Fame, you can attain fame by being disreputable, right? And you can have a great reputation without being famous. So they're not exactly the same. Right.

00:20:38 Speaker_03
And those are very, very different things.

00:20:40 Speaker_01
They are. And the reputation, it's also the case that the, kingdom of heaven that Christ tells people to store treasure in is a reputational storehouse. So the gospel injunction basically is that the safest place to store value is in reputation.

00:20:58 Speaker_01
And that makes perfect sense to me. I think that's exactly right. So, okay, so the second part of the covenant is you'll make a name among other people and it'll be justified. So that's a good deal. And the third part is

00:21:16 Speaker_01
you'll establish something permanent, a dynasty, right? So that's what makes Abraham the father of nations. So now there's a new idea that enters into that. So the idea is that

00:21:31 Speaker_01
The pattern of following the spirit of adventure is the same pattern that makes for the best fatherly mode of being, and that that has a multi-generational effect.

00:21:43 Speaker_01
And so that if you embody the father properly, you radically increase the probability of the paternal success of your children. And I think that's true. I think that's right.

00:21:55 Speaker_01
So I was thinking about this in relationship to Dawkins' theory of the selfish gene. It's the implication of the selfish gene is that reproduction takes primacy and that there's no difference between reproduction and sex. But that's not true.

00:22:16 Speaker_01
There is a big difference between reproduction and sex, especially among human beings, because we're high investment. parents. It isn't just sex and the offspring runs off into the world. It's a multi-generational investment.

00:22:32 Speaker_01
That's why we live as long as we do because it's a grand parental investment as well as a parental investment. So imagine that to maximize the reproductive success of your offspring, you have to instantiate the pattern of the father.

00:22:44 Speaker_01
And that's the divine pattern of the father, right? And so, and God tells Abraham that you embody that pattern by pursuing the spirit of adventure. So that's cool. That's cool. And then there's one last thing.

00:22:58 Speaker_01
He says, you'll do all three of those things in a way that'll be a benefit to everyone else. And so then you think, so this is so, you think about this biologically even, so,

00:23:07 Speaker_01
You see this in your kids, they have this impetus to master the world, right?

00:23:11 Speaker_01
And now you want to watch that, and you want to encourage that, and you do that by establishing a relationship that's separate, because I'm sure your boys are quite different.

00:23:21 Speaker_02
Oh yeah.

00:23:21 Speaker_01
Yes, because children differ a lot from one another, so you have to establish a different relationship with each of them. But there's commonality in the relationship because it's an encouraging relationship if you're a good father.

00:23:32 Speaker_01
So now, Matt, that you embody that encouraging relationship optimally, well, God's promise to Abraham is that's what makes you the father of nations, I think. That's such a lovely equation because it makes the case that the same instinct that

00:23:53 Speaker_01
calls a child out into the world and that underlies the excitement of adventure is the same, it's the same spirit that produces all four of those benefits.

00:24:05 Speaker_01
And I thought, well, it has to be that way, because how would it possibly be that the spirit that calls us to move out in the world wouldn't also confer maximum social and reproductive benefit? It's literally everything.

00:24:20 Speaker_03
I mean, you're basically saying everything, right? Like, if you do what you are supposed to do, Then everything comes to you. You will order the world.

00:24:28 Speaker_03
I can tell you that from being on tour with you and watching the people that you turned around, literally in tears, hundreds of people out of thousands, sometimes in tears at once, because they were off drugs or because they were in a better relationship or they mended a relationship.

00:24:43 Speaker_03
Do you remember when we went to when we were in Dublin and it was, we had done, it was like 10 different countries in 15 nights, something crazy. You did press all day long.

00:24:53 Speaker_03
It was an exhausting day and we end the show and we're in a, it was a sort of very small old school theater in Dublin. And we end up in the alley after because you don't walk out the front, you know, to where everybody's gonna mob you.

00:25:05 Speaker_03
And it was about 1 a.m. and we walk out and it's a dark alley and we had no security. It was just me, you, Tammy and John, the tour manager. And there were two guys about 40 yards away from us and we could sort of see them.

00:25:18 Speaker_03
And it almost seemed like they were fighting or something. They started kind of rushing towards us. And we all thought for a second that they were, you know, gonna jump us or something. And then as they got closer, we saw they were both in tears.

00:25:29 Speaker_03
One guy was probably about late 50s and one guy was probably early 20s. And they told us that it was a father and son who had had a falling out about eight years before, had not spoke in eight years independently

00:25:43 Speaker_03
went to the show alone, saw each other there and made amends. I mean, I just got chills up my spine telling you the story again. Like, what's the point of that? The point is that if you order yourself, that you will order the world. That's real.

00:25:58 Speaker_03
There's a line that I've been reading from Carl Young, who I know had a little influence on you over the years, that I've been ending a lot of my shows with lately. I'm gonna slightly butcher the exact quote, but in essence, that if you don't,

00:26:09 Speaker_03
do the call for adventure. If you don't go on the call for adventure, the exact thing you're asking for, you will be left with nothing but neurosis. Life, the walls will basically close in on you. And we all know this.

00:26:23 Speaker_01
Think of all the interesting... Yeah, that's all that's left is the suffering. The pointless suffering.

00:26:27 Speaker_03
Think of all the interesting, cool people that you and I have had the privilege of being around in these last eight years since we met. Eight years ago this month, actually.

00:26:33 Speaker_01
Right, right.

00:26:34 Speaker_03
You said it's been eight years. I think it was eight years ago this week. It was November. It was the second week of November in 2016. I had just moved into a new house. We were building my home studio in the garage. I didn't even have internet.

00:26:47 Speaker_03
stealing internet from my neighbor. We did this, you were just on the scene because of the free speech bill. And suddenly my Twitter feed was blowing up. You got to talk to this guy, Jordan Peterson. We jump on a Skype. People can find this online.

00:27:01 Speaker_03
We jump on the Skype. It's very sketchy in and out. The picture's no good. It's all pixelated. And you're in your office and I'm sitting in my house and we're talking, you're doing the Peter Pan story and everything. And it ends and I turned to David

00:27:16 Speaker_03
I swear on my life. And I said to him, that guy is either the most brilliant person I've ever talked to or completely insane. I leave it to you to decide.

00:27:25 Speaker_01
I guess I leave it to the- There's still plenty of discussion about that.

00:27:28 Speaker_03
Right, exactly. But, flash forward eight years, we've both been on adventures that have kind of collided at times and then gone separately at times, good, bad, all sorts, health things, all the kids, all the stuff.

00:27:42 Speaker_03
And yet, I think that we're probably both sitting here as good as we've ever been. That's a sort of scary, I don't like saying it in some sense, because then it feels like it's inviting doom or something.

00:27:54 Speaker_03
But I think it's only because I've seen that when you do what you're supposed to do, when you really do it, and you say something true, even just, connected to the political world of the last couple years.

00:28:06 Speaker_03
Like, I think we had a little something to do with getting people to wake up to what was going on in the world. You know, you did it at the sort of psychological, personal front. I kind of did it on the political front.

00:28:17 Speaker_03
And we have an unbelievably hopeful world coming right now, I think.

00:28:23 Speaker_01
So in the Cain and Abel story, Cain makes second-rate sacrifices, right? So he doesn't bring his best to the table. And in consequence, he fails.

00:28:37 Speaker_01
This is one of these situations where the meaning of the pattern of human life is being acted out by people who can't propositionalize it yet, who can't conceptualize it explicitly. So they're acting it out. And so human beings discovered

00:28:56 Speaker_01
at some point that they could sacrifice the present for the future and themselves for the community. And that that actually worked better as a medium to long-term strategy. So that's why the community is based on sacrifice.

00:29:12 Speaker_01
And you've made reference to that with regard to the impulse that entered your imagination when you were taking your son to the hospital, that realization that

00:29:22 Speaker_01
There's something more important, well, than you even in total in a way, but certainly than what you might merely want at the moment, right?

00:29:30 Speaker_01
And so Cain, who's kind of Luciferian and he thinks he can get away with his tricks, he doesn't bring his best to the table and he fails. And so he could... notice that and rectify his fault and confess and atone and fly right and succeed.

00:29:51 Speaker_01
That's on the table. But instead he becomes bitter and he shakes his fist at God. And so his presumption fundamentally is that the fact of his failure is emblematic of the dysfunction of the world.

00:30:07 Speaker_01
It's not him, even though he's not bringing his best to the table. It's the structure of reality itself. So it's unbelievably arrogant, right? So that's the Luciferian element. Unbelievably intellectually arrogant.

00:30:19 Speaker_03
It's not me. What wouldn't you do to the world if you believe that? What wouldn't you do?

00:30:25 Speaker_01
Yeah, you'd burn it to the ground. Well, that's basically what happens in the story as it unfolds. He goes, he shakes his fist at God, and then he has a conversation with God.

00:30:38 Speaker_01
And God says, basically, he says, you think that you're suffering because you're not doing well, and that that's a consequence of your misery. First of all, if you did well, you would be accepted. So that's a very interesting claim.

00:30:54 Speaker_01
The idea is that if you, gave it everything you had, it would work. And you can imagine that that's a kind of faith, right? That you have to have faith to do that.

00:31:04 Speaker_01
Because there's no evidence to begin with that if you brought your best to the table, it would work. And you know, maybe you've had experiences where people betrayed you and so forth that made you doubtful or you betrayed yourself. So it is

00:31:18 Speaker_01
emblematic of faith to bring your best to the table. God's rejoinder to Cain is that if you brought your best to the table, you would succeed.

00:31:27 Speaker_01
Now, you can imagine people being skeptical about that, but I think the right response to the skeptics is, have you brought your best to the table?

00:31:37 Speaker_03
What's the other option?

00:31:38 Speaker_01
Well, that's what's explored. And then God says something even stranger to Cain. He says something like, You're also blaming your suffering on your failure, but that's not exactly right.

00:31:54 Speaker_01
And this is very interesting causally, because we like to think that, you know, people who go crooked, let's say, do that because they've been hurt, because terrible things have happened to them.

00:32:05 Speaker_01
There's an intervening variable theory in this account between Cain and Abel. So what God tells Cain is that there were many ways that he could have reacted to the fact of his own failure, and he picked one. And the one he picked was,

00:32:20 Speaker_01
rife with a terrible temptation. He says, sin crouches at your door like a sexually aroused predatory animal, and you let it in to have its way with you.

00:32:30 Speaker_01
And so the idea there is that Cain is turning to vengeful bitterness in consequence of his failure when that wasn't the only option. And so he's inviting the spirit of vengeful bitterness to possess him, and then he's actually

00:32:49 Speaker_01
to have its way with him, and he's actually entering into a creative union with that, and that that's the cause of his misery.

00:32:58 Speaker_01
And that's the end of the discussion, and that enrages Cain, and that's when he invites Abel to go work with him, so it's a false invitation, and then he kills him. And then Cain's children,

00:33:13 Speaker_01
become more and more murderous, and his grandchildren make weapons of war, and the next story is the flood or the Tower of Babel, right? So it's a complete story of human degeneration.

00:33:24 Speaker_01
And it's a covenantal account too, because Cain violates the covenant with God by not bringing everything he has to bear on the situation. And you think, well, what's the counter proposition to that? The counter proposition is that you can succeed

00:33:43 Speaker_01
by hedging your bets. Well, who would believe that? Like when you lay it out rightly like that.

00:33:48 Speaker_03
You might just get away with it, something like that. Well, that's the hope.

00:33:53 Speaker_01
But then underneath that, there's obviously the idea that you're smart enough to pull the wool over what? Your eyes, everyone else's, God's eyes, everyone's eyes. That's who you are. Or worse, that's the spirit that you've invited to possess you.

00:34:06 Speaker_01
Right, and then when it reveals itself completely, it turns out to be fratricidal and then genocidal.

00:34:12 Speaker_03
That's probably how most of us operate on a day-to-day basis, right? I mean, most people probably operate on some version of pulling the wool over their eyes, right? Yeah, well, that's certainly- I'm not talking about the most exceptional people.

00:34:26 Speaker_03
I'm not talking about like that level.

00:34:27 Speaker_01
Well, that's the question of conscience for everyone. It's like, well, if things aren't going your way, just whose fault is that?

00:34:37 Speaker_01
Well, the other thing you might want to realize, too, is that if you're lucky, it's your fault, because you could do something about that.

00:34:44 Speaker_01
If it's the state of the world, let's say, or if it's God's distaste for you at some fundamental level, let's say, or the impossibility of existence in general, then you're really in hell. But if it's you,

00:35:00 Speaker_01
Well, then you could possibly do something about it if you were willing to.

00:35:05 Speaker_03
Maybe clean your room, perhaps?

00:35:06 Speaker_01
Wouldn't that be something to do? Maybe. Well, you could start by straightening out what you can straighten out. Well, you said, you know, you saw on the tour repeatedly the fact that that worked for so many people.

00:35:19 Speaker_01
And so, you know, and that's part of the reason why we've kept this going. Well, it's the reason that we've kept it going.

00:35:25 Speaker_01
You know, it's extremely interesting and it's great to have the opportunity to think on my feet and but... Well, it's your adventure.

00:35:33 Speaker_03
Yeah, right. It's your adventure. I saw it then and I know, even though we're not on tour together right now, I know you're still doing it.

00:35:39 Speaker_01
You know, I had forgotten that you were... I wonder if you were the first relatively large podcaster to talk to me after everything blew up in Canada. It might have been, you know, because like I made those videos on Bill C-16.

00:36:01 Speaker_01
in about mid-October in 2016. And so it was... And what was happening in your career at that point? Like, you were established on YouTube already as a commentator.

00:36:12 Speaker_03
Now, at that point... I had left the left, so to speak, you know. I was still fighting for the same liberal values that I actually still believe in. Can't use the word liberal anymore. We can get into that if you want.

00:36:24 Speaker_03
It just becomes impossible linguistically to explain why liberal values are no longer associated with the liberals, which we both obviously talked a lot about. But I was really independent for the first time at that point.

00:36:36 Speaker_03
I had just bought my first house. We were doing the home studio thing. Really, nobody had done that. I really was at the front end of building a TV-ready studio. I mean, you came to that house many times and we did a lot of great shows there.

00:36:50 Speaker_03
And I was building something that could have just as easily been replicated in Fox or CNN or elsewhere. We turned a bedroom into a control room. We had a proper lighting grid. We did it. We did it. All the right equipment, right staff, etc.

00:37:03 Speaker_03
But the main thing that I was still harping on politically was free speech because I saw the hysteria of the left. And then I started looking at Twitter and Twitter obviously was very different at the time, but you know what it was like.

00:37:16 Speaker_03
You'd tweet something and then you'd look at the mentions and suddenly everybody's going on and on about this guy, Jordan Peterson. I thought, well, let's talk to this guy, Jordan Peterson and my studio is not ready and he's up in Canada.

00:37:28 Speaker_03
So we'll jump on Skype and do it. I think it might've actually been my first Skype interview ever, you know, and then during COVID that obviously became kind of ubiquitous. But from that point, I think I, I just went in on the free speech thing.

00:37:45 Speaker_03
It was, well, I knew it was right, but it also felt, it felt deeply important. And now- Why did you decide to come on tour with me? Because that was pretty soon afterwards, right? You may not remember how it happened, but it almost was a joke.

00:37:59 Speaker_03
And this says a lot about you, actually. You, me, and Ben Shapiro did a show at my house in January, I believe- 2018. It was 2018. Yeah, yeah.

00:38:09 Speaker_03
It was January 2018, the three of us did the show and you were doing your first theater show that night at the Orpheum in LA. Okay, okay. And we did like a three hour show, the three of us.

00:38:22 Speaker_03
And I kept, I knew you and Ben could just do this all day long. I barely had to be there. I just had to, you know, kind of look one way every now and again. but I knew you had this big theater show, so I wanted to end it a little bit early.

00:38:33 Speaker_03
We ended up going about three hours, and then as we were saying goodbye, and we had only met in person, I don't know, three times, maybe, maybe, maybe that was the second time we met, I'm not even sure.

00:38:43 Speaker_03
I said to you, and I was kind of joking, as you were standing on the stoop of my house, leaving to go to the theater,

00:38:49 Speaker_03
I said to you, hey, Jordan, do you want me to come tonight and I'll crack a couple jokes about lobsters and some of the other funny references? And you said, yeah, that would be a great idea. And then I came, the Orpheum was sold out.

00:39:00 Speaker_03
It was the most people I had ever, you know, I'd been doing standup for years, but I had never done a 5,000 seat theater. I guess I crushed it, and the whole CAA team was right there. And I remember the two agents came right up to me.

00:39:12 Speaker_03
They said, this show is amazing. We're going to take this on tour. You want to open for him? I said, well, we should probably ask Jordan. And then you immediately said yes. And then it completely changed my life. I look back on it like it was a dream.

00:39:23 Speaker_03
Sometimes I really think back. I'm like, did we really do that thing? It was incredible.

00:39:29 Speaker_01
Well, even at renting that damn theater, you know, so. Because you had no idea.

00:39:33 Speaker_03
And do you remember one of the things that I would always say at the top of the show, and I tried to switch it up as much as possible, definitely not as much as you, because I felt my job was to be funny so that people would come and feel relaxed for the first 10 or 15 minutes.

00:39:47 Speaker_03
then Jordan could do his thing, and then I would try to be silly with you for the most part. At the end, that way it felt like a complete show. That was what I always felt. Because otherwise, people were coming for hardcore stuff.

00:39:57 Speaker_03
I mean, unbelievably impactful stuff. And I didn't want them leaving with that. I wanted them to walk out of there like, wow, we had a great time. And then tell their friends. So I always felt that that was my job.

00:40:07 Speaker_03
And I think that because we did it that way, I think something that you've told me a few times in the last year or two, that your audience now has matured with you. And I love that. That actually, that's the Jacob Blatter story right there, right?

00:40:21 Speaker_03
You took what was largely young men who had whatever their issues were at the time and maybe the way culture was treating them and everything else. You helped order them. They were getting dressed, right? All these guys coming up in suits.

00:40:33 Speaker_03
We were in Sweden and I stopped at an H&M in Sweden. because I wanted a new suit for that show.

00:40:39 Speaker_03
And the guy in front of me, I hear him talking to the cashier and he tells the cashier in English, he tells the cashier that he's buying his first suit because he's going to a Jordan Peterson show tonight. And I tapped him on the shoulder.

00:40:48 Speaker_03
I said, I am too. And then we called him out on the show that night. But now you've said that your audience has matured with you. And now some of them are in better, you know, they're in better relationships. They now have kids.

00:40:57 Speaker_03
You're talking to people who five years ago were a complete disaster. That's literally the story you're telling me right now.

00:41:04 Speaker_01
It's incredible. So in the Abrahamic story, so you have the story of Cain and Abel, and it describes the way that the psyche and then the society deteriorates, right?

00:41:17 Speaker_01
This pattern of insufficient sacrifice, the invitation to the spirit of Luciferian bitterness and resentment, fratricide, and then the decay of society as a whole, right?

00:41:30 Speaker_01
And then you have the flood, which is the degeneration in the direction of chaos. Then you have the Tower of Babel, which is degeneration into totalitarianism, right? So it's pathology of chaos.

00:41:44 Speaker_01
It's like degeneration of the individual and society, pathology of chaos, pathology of order. Then you have the story of Abraham, which is the antidote to that. So it's like Abraham is the new Abel.

00:41:58 Speaker_01
So he decides that he's going to forego his comfort and follow the spirit of adventure. One of the claims that I've been making on in this book but also on the last tour was that

00:42:14 Speaker_01
So the divine is characterized in the Old and New Testaments also as the truth that will set you free. And so adventure is part of that, and truth is part of that, and they're reflective of the same unified thing.

00:42:28 Speaker_01
And I think the reason for that is that there is no better adventure than the truth. And the reason for that, it touches on things we've already discussed, but I think there's a technical reason for that.

00:42:42 Speaker_01
If you want something from someone, you can craft your words to get that thing you want. And maybe you'll get it, maybe you won't. And you might say that you succeed when you get it.

00:42:54 Speaker_01
But the problem with that hypothesis is, how do you know that you wanted the right thing? That's a really big problem because lots of times we chase the wrong thing. Well, there's an alternative approach, which is,

00:43:08 Speaker_01
You say what you believe to be the case, and you make the presumption, that's faith, let's say, you make the presumption that whatever happens as a consequence of that is the best thing that could happen.

00:43:20 Speaker_01
But also, this is the adventurous part, you don't know what's gonna happen, right? And so you're throwing yourself into the fray. I'm going to say what I think, and there'll be consequences, but I don't know what they are.

00:43:35 Speaker_01
Well, you think, well, that's scary. Well, yeah, but it's extremely interesting.

00:43:43 Speaker_03
It's ridiculously exciting. Well, relative to what's happening in the world right now, just the results of this election and the fact that a bunch of us

00:43:52 Speaker_03
the laundry list of people, whether it was you and I, or Rogan, or Brett Weinstein, or Douglas Murray, or just all of these people that just started talking. That's all we were doing.

00:44:01 Speaker_03
When that whole intellectual dark web thing happened, all it was was that we were talking.

00:44:05 Speaker_03
There was magic to it in that people were hearing things from you that maybe they hadn't heard before, or they should have heard before, or their parents didn't tell them, or something like that, or education didn't give them.

00:44:14 Speaker_03
or they were hearing a biological explanation about evolution from breath that they hadn't heard before, something like that.

00:44:20 Speaker_03
But really what was happening, we were having honest discussions and disagreements and agreements about a whole host of things, and there was no other outlet for that. So I think- There was also no other agenda than that. And there was no agenda.

00:44:32 Speaker_03
And that's the thing. And in some ways, that's why we couldn't all turn it into something. You know, there was this moment where everyone was like, oh my God, are you guys a TV network? Are you a road show? Are you a podcast? Like, what is this thing?

00:44:43 Speaker_03
Is it? everyone on tour together, whatever. And we couldn't quite figure it out because I think partly because we were just doing it for the sake of doing it. I was doing what I thought was best in my life. And I think it's born out that way.

00:44:58 Speaker_03
I think you did as well. But look what happened to the world since then.

00:45:02 Speaker_01
We were very early adopters of a very powerful technology. So that was- Right, so there were two things.

00:45:08 Speaker_03
So there are two parts, right? So the first part is just that we were talking, right? And nobody else was having mature conversations anywhere, anywhere.

00:45:15 Speaker_03
When I started doing long form interviews, the reason I was doing it was because everyone started going on Snapchat and it was driving me crazy. I thought this thing's making everybody dumber.

00:45:24 Speaker_03
I'm not even sure that Snapchat really exists anymore, but it was, you know, 10 second and there were Vine. Do you remember Vine videos? It was a portion of Twitter, these six second looped videos. And I thought, this is insane.

00:45:35 Speaker_03
There's so many things to talk about. There's so much going on in the world. Why are we just dumbing everything and clipping everything down like this? I had become friends with Larry King and I thought, that's what I want to do.

00:45:46 Speaker_03
I want to sit with somebody and hear what they have to say. And then now subsequently in the last eight years, everybody and their brother has a podcast and everyone's doing it. But I think we were early in on that. And then you're right.

00:45:58 Speaker_03
We were early in, there were people in before us for sure, but we were early in on leveraging what technology was gonna do. Rogan got in around the same time I did.

00:46:09 Speaker_03
I mean, the network that I worked for, the Young Turks, I don't have a lot of good things to say about them, but Cenk Uygur did realize that online was going to matter more than mainstream.

00:46:19 Speaker_03
And I think if we've seen anything in the last week, I mean, my argument these last two or three months was that this was not an election about Trump versus Kamala or liberals versus conservatives or Democrats versus Republicans.

00:46:30 Speaker_03
This was basically the election on reality.

00:46:33 Speaker_03
and how many people are still gonna swallow the lies, and we can go through the laundry list of things that they've lied about, that the machine has lied about, from very fine people to, you know, the vaccine stops COVID.

00:46:43 Speaker_03
I mean, we can do the whole thing. And so that was one portion of people and the rest of us that where it's messy and maybe RFK is right about some things, maybe not, but what's bringing Tulsi over? And we did that rescue the Republic event.

00:46:57 Speaker_03
And it was like, what was bringing Russell Brand and you and me and RFK and Tulsi and Brett, all of these people. None of this would make any sense in an ordered world, but the world had gotten so out of control that suddenly it pushed us together.

00:47:12 Speaker_03
I think that's actually exactly what you just laid out in the story right there. It went so haywire that suddenly we all got pushed together. And so I guess my question to you then would be, are we now on the other side?

00:47:25 Speaker_03
Doesn't it feel like something has fundamentally shifted?

00:47:29 Speaker_01
Well, I think what really, what put the capstone on was the last month of this presidential election. I think what happened was that Barron Trump got the ear of Trump and knew the podcast world.

00:47:49 Speaker_01
And Trump being very entrepreneurial and a risk taker decided to pay attention. Yeah. Because he picked a lot of podcasts that you'd only pick if you knew the podcast world.

00:48:02 Speaker_01
I think Rogan's an obvious choice because he's the 800 pound gorilla, obviously. Although I'm not saying it wasn't. courageous and wise of Trump to go on Rogan.

00:48:13 Speaker_03
No, basically no other politician would ever do a three-hour unedited sitcom like that.

00:48:18 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, and there's still, there's certainly this delusion that I think the legacy media and perhaps even the Democrats are starting to realize, perhaps, that their consistent insistence that

00:48:33 Speaker_01
Rogan is a fringe figure and certainly like some kind of gateway to the right is ignorant and preposterous, both of those things.

00:48:42 Speaker_03
Yet bizarrely true now also, right?

00:48:44 Speaker_01
Well, yeah, but the thing is... It shouldn't be, it shouldn't be. The thing he's a gateway to, it's a very strange version of the right.

00:48:53 Speaker_03
Well, that's what they used to say about me. I was, because I left the left, but wait a minute, this guy's gay, still liberal, mostly pro-choice, like we could do the whole laundry list of things, but that I was just willing to talk to people.

00:49:04 Speaker_03
So then suddenly I'm talking to you, and then I was like, yeah, I'll talk to Shapiro. I'll talk to Glenn Beck. That's a scary guy. He's a crazy right winger. I'll talk to Larry Elder, et cetera, et cetera.

00:49:14 Speaker_03
So then that's what people used to say to me all the time. You're the gateway drug.

00:49:18 Speaker_03
The funny thing about Rogan is if you see what the media is doing with him now is they're going, the mainstream media is going, you know, why is it that we don't have our own Rogan? Well, you idiots, you had him. You had him.

00:49:29 Speaker_03
You refused to talk about it and you tried to get him kicked off Spotify.

00:49:33 Speaker_01
Did you see Hurwitz made public, Greg Hurwitz made public this week. Oh, I did see it. I thought that was really good, that message that he, because Greg was a very influential consultant to the Democrats and a messenger, like very influential.

00:49:47 Speaker_01
And he sent them an invitation from all of us essentially back in 2017 saying, hey, the reason that none of you are on our shows is because you say no, it's not because you're not being invited. And I invited

00:50:02 Speaker_01
dozens of high-ranking Democrats to come on my podcast, and all of them said no. They would talk to me privately, but not publicly.

00:50:11 Speaker_03
As recently as I believe it was last March when we were having the big bipartisan border deal fight, remember that? There were three days of we're going to pass this bipartisan deal to deal with the border, even though we don't need a law passed.

00:50:22 Speaker_03
It's obviously the president is allowed to deal with the border. We went to D.C. We hunkered down in a studio for a day in Rumble Studios. We invited 20 Republicans and 20 Democrats. 19 Republicans said yes.

00:50:35 Speaker_03
The only one who couldn't do it that day was Rand Paul because one of his staffers got stabbed on the street of DC. That tells you everything you need to know about that. 19 of 20 Democrats did not respond.

00:50:46 Speaker_03
The only one who responded was Ilhan Omar, which was kind of hilarious. And she said, no, but that tells you it right there. I am not thought of as a gotcha interviewer, right?

00:50:58 Speaker_03
The biggest knock on me for years is, oh, Rubin's just going to throw you softballs. I was just interested in talking to people, but the idea that no... Oh, that's Rogan too.

00:51:06 Speaker_01
Rogan's probably a little harsher than you, but he's not a gotcha interviewer ever.

00:51:11 Speaker_03
No, but... if you have the entire cultural apparatus, which the Democrats in essence had, and then you don't, you just think you can ignore the thing. You'll ignore it until you can't ignore it anymore.

00:51:22 Speaker_03
I think what's now happened is they cannot ignore it anymore.

00:51:26 Speaker_01
That is exactly what happened.

00:51:27 Speaker_03
If I was getting the views or you were getting the views that MSNBC were getting, I would consider a new career. I actually mean that at this point. We're blowing them out of the water.

00:51:35 Speaker_03
And I'm not telling you it's because I'm the best journalist in the world. I don't even consider myself a journalist. I tell people what I think. I see the news in the morning.

00:51:43 Speaker_03
And then partly because of being on tour with you, I try to do in the hour long show that I do every day, I try to tell a story. I don't just try to say, oh, there's 10 things going on. I try to loop it into some sort of narrative story.

00:51:57 Speaker_03
and you've met my producer, Phoenix, who you hugely helped in his own life, and then we started working together, and now we craft a story so that if people give me an hour of their day, which is an awful lot of time, five days, and I'm very aware of that, I'm very aware of that, and I don't expect everyone to do it, and maybe you can only give me five minutes one day, and one day you'll give me an hour, or whatever it might be, but I want you to walk away with, oh, there's some context to what's going on here, not just, okay, this guy said this, and this one did this, and just,

00:52:26 Speaker_03
because otherwise we'll do that forever, right? We'll just do it forever.

00:52:28 Speaker_03
And I think by all of us having these conversations, by starting to find these alliances, by the left being so hysterical, and you may remember we were in Miami a couple of years ago at a party in a backyard.

00:52:42 Speaker_03
And there was a big debate about what do we do. It was a lot of your friends, a lot of our friends. And there was a big debate about what do we do with the Democrats. And I kept saying they are not coming around. They are not coming around.

00:52:54 Speaker_03
And Greg was taking the counter position. And I'm not saying that I'm not trying to pat myself on the back here because I would like them to come around. I think maybe now You know, we were no right.

00:53:04 Speaker_03
So it's going to be it's going to be years now because they still have an opportunity now, but there's an opportunity at least he was going to take the destruction. And I think we have the destruction now.

00:53:13 Speaker_03
I don't know how haywire it goes on their side, but I think that was it. The only thing that people on the right did that somehow now makes Joe Rogan a Trump supporter is that they were willing to talk. That's it.

00:53:25 Speaker_03
willing to talk and willing to question things. And then it got put on steroids with COVID.

00:53:28 Speaker_01
It's so funny watching the MSNBC people do a postmortem on what's their claim, the right stranglehold on the new media. It's like, well, You can't really call it a stranglehold when the reason it exists is because you wouldn't participate.

00:53:51 Speaker_01
And so you just, you refuse to admit to the reality of the new technology and you refuse to engage despite repeated good faith offers, like endlessly repeated good faith offers with people

00:54:09 Speaker_01
It certainly wasn't inevitable that Rogan was going to transform into a Trump supporter. No, they have themselves to blame.

00:54:16 Speaker_03
Yeah, definitely. They have absolutely themselves to blame. Look, when I got the offer for my first book, we were on tour, we were in, maybe we were in Copenhagen, I think.

00:54:27 Speaker_03
And I told you backstage, and you know, of course, one of the rules is be happy for your friends when you hear good news, slightly butchering it. And the way you smiled and slapped your hands, and you were sitting in a rotating chair.

00:54:37 Speaker_03
And I remember your chair fully spun around. You were so happy for me. That book, Don't Burn This Book, became a New York Times bestseller. It should have been like number two or three, but you know, they fiddle with the numbers.

00:54:47 Speaker_03
I don't even care about that. I mentioned that only because I could not get on MSNBC, CNN, or any mainstream media. Fox put me on constantly.

00:54:57 Speaker_01
So again, it's like- It's the same with 12 Rules. Like that was, I think that's the biggest selling nonfiction book in Canadian history, I think.

00:55:07 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:55:08 Speaker_01
It's certainly close and- Oh, they said, right.

00:55:10 Speaker_03
They said you weren't publishing- Well, that's the first thing.

00:55:12 Speaker_01
The New York Times never did put it on the list. Right. Never. And so that was pretty interesting. And then I had no mainstream media interviews about 12 rules in the United States, like zero. Fox, Fox, yes, Fox. But then think about what happens.

00:55:31 Speaker_03
So then you do that unbelievable interview with Kathy Newman, right? And then suddenly this thing happens online. I mean, that was that Kathy Newman moment.

00:55:41 Speaker_03
That was an unbelievably like tear the internet in half moment for people that were paying attention. So now this huge,

00:55:49 Speaker_03
well of support, well, it's support, it's love, and it's hate, and it's anger, and it's confusion, all the emotions that anyone could have about any of this, that's happening online, and it's being completely ignored on the mainstream.

00:55:59 Speaker_01
So now people- Well, ignored enough so that Channel 4, which was the interview, actually posted the whole interview online without even, I think, a moment's consideration. That just stunned me that they did that.

00:56:11 Speaker_03
Well, the best part of that was, didn't she, right after the interview, didn't she do a little selfie or something in her car where she was basically like, ah, you know, I sat down with this guy, it was no big deal or whatever.

00:56:22 Speaker_03
And then once she realized how sort of bad she looked, then of course she wanted to play the victim and everything else. But the point that I'm trying to show there is that there has been something going on online

00:56:35 Speaker_03
with the thing that's in all of our pockets all the time that we're all paying attention to, probably way too much time of the day, that was being completely ignored by the mainstream.

00:56:45 Speaker_03
And that's why when you say, well, what's going on at MSNBC and they can't do a proper post-mortem and now they're saying the Latinos are white supremacists or the gays are white supremacists.

00:56:54 Speaker_03
It's like, because you guys ignored, you lied about everything and ignored all of us the entire time. Not only did you not have to do it, if they would have been, I bet you, I bet you 10% better we would not be in this situation right now.

00:57:10 Speaker_03
we would probably have Kamala Harris as the president-elect. Because most people are willing to swallow a lot of shit. You know what I mean? Like we all have our own problems, all of our own stuff. But they went so in on all of the lies.

00:57:23 Speaker_03
The fact that Barack Obama, two days before the election, gave a speech, I think it was in Wisconsin, where he said that Donald Trump went to a white supremacist rally and said there were very fine people on both sides.

00:57:33 Speaker_03
The fact that he ran with that hoax again, after it has been debunked.

00:57:38 Speaker_01
By people who wouldn't debunk it unless it was seriously not true.

00:57:42 Speaker_03
I think the first time that got to mainstream media was me on Real Time because James Carville brought it up. with Maher, and I had never heard it said on mainstream, and I wasn't going to let him get away with it.

00:57:51 Speaker_03
And I said, what are you talking about? The next sentence out of his mouth was, but I'm not talking about the white supremacists and the neo-Nazis who should be condemned entirely.

00:57:58 Speaker_03
But Carville literally crumbles to the table because he did not know what to do when confronted with reality. And then Bill, Bill said, well, it was worded inarticulately or something to that effect. And I thought, well, that's an interesting way of

00:58:11 Speaker_03
playing a little bit of cleanup on that. But the point is, they thought, I think Obama, well, what would your psychological analysis of Obama be right there? It's two days before the election.

00:58:22 Speaker_03
He either believes it, which there's no way he could be that dumb and ignorant. Simply impossible. But maybe you want to give him 5% chance. You want to give him 5%? What do you want to give him on that? Let's give him 20%, right? Okay, great, 20%.

00:58:36 Speaker_03
So he's unbelievably dumb and ignorant, and he ran the speech by nobody who's willing to confront him with reality. Or what would the only alternative be?

00:58:44 Speaker_03
He knows he can lie, it doesn't matter how big the lie is, and he thinks the lie will accomplish the goal, that the ends justify the means. I think they got to the end of that road. I think that's what this election was. It will not work anymore.

00:58:56 Speaker_03
You cannot tell us that vaccines work when they don't. You cannot tell us that there are very fine people on both sides.

00:59:02 Speaker_03
You can't tell us that Brett Kavanaugh is a serial rapist or that the Covington kids are racist or that Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist. I mean, we could do a million versions. That six-foot social distancing was scientifically backed.

00:59:13 Speaker_03
And I think that's actually what this election was about. It really, Trump then became the avatar that was sort of wrapped around that thing. And then she became, Kamala basically became the avatar for the machine.

00:59:23 Speaker_01
We talked too about the fact that in the last month, a lot of radical things happened around Trump the last month.

00:59:29 Speaker_04
Oh, yeah.

00:59:30 Speaker_01
I mean, the fact that this weird coalition gathered around him, which is, you know, completely preposterous. It's completely preposterous that Elon Musk is now going to be running the Department of Governmental Efficiency and that.

00:59:44 Speaker_01
has the same acronym as Doge. That was a coin and it's a funny dog and it's do only good every day. It's like what the hell is going on here?

00:59:52 Speaker_01
It's ridiculously comical that Musk is actually an X-Man because that's the name of his platform and that idea has been obsessing him for years and that Gabbard is on board and that Robert F. Kennedy came along and that Vance is along and so is

01:00:08 Speaker_01
Vivek Ramaswamy. I mean, these are very unlikely, very unlikely Republicans, very unlikely. And so that's weird as hell. And it's like, seriously, surreally, this is Pulp Fiction weird.

01:00:20 Speaker_03
So what do you think the unifying principle is? To me, it's that they love America. Like that's sort of like the, you would say low resolution bumper sticker.

01:00:28 Speaker_01
I think they're all iconic clasps too. I think it's analogous in some ways on the political side to what happened with the media, the new media that we were describing. There wasn't anything really that we had in common.

01:00:42 Speaker_01
Let's say you and I or Weinstein or Rogan, Shapiro, like that was a very, Diverse group of people it was free speech in the most. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I guess in the essence.

01:00:55 Speaker_01
Yeah Yeah, it was well, I think the thing we had in in common essentially was our approach to discourse Yeah, that was really all yeah, I mean, you know what each of us taken in pairs had things in common but

01:01:09 Speaker_01
It was devotion to discourse, open discourse, conversational discourse, essentially. And in a way, in a sense, an agenda-free conversational discourse. I mean, one of the things that makes Rogan so perennially popular

01:01:26 Speaker_01
is that he's just trying to figure out what's going on. And that really is the case. And you know, Rogan, you know that what you see is what you get. He's exact... All you people, all the people in that group are exactly the same on camera and off.

01:01:38 Speaker_01
Exactly. There's no persona. They're just exactly who they are. And... And all of those people were and are iconoclastic, right? They didn't fit well in organizations. They all started their own thing.

01:01:53 Speaker_01
And that's really the same thing that's characteristic of these people that have gathered around Trump. And then, as we alluded to, we also have this other strange occurrence, which is the death throes of the legacy media.

01:02:09 Speaker_01
Most Douglas Murray, I talked to him the other day and he said, well, don't throw all of the legacy media under the bus. There is the New York Post, for example. The Fox News people are trying to do their best.

01:02:18 Speaker_01
You know, you have the free press with Barry, but that's new media too. So by and large, The liberal end of the legacy media have doomed themselves to perdition because they got partisan and deceitful.

01:02:33 Speaker_01
And they were also willingly blind because they didn't pay attention to the new media at all.

01:02:38 Speaker_03
Well, nobody could be that bad at their job. No janitor could be so horrible at his job and still have a job the next day. Joe Scarborough lies every day. He sits in a chair at MSNBC at a giant corporation to lie.

01:02:53 Speaker_03
Somebody up there, I don't know who his boss is, but somebody up the chain of the corporation knows that he's lying about all of these things.

01:02:59 Speaker_03
They know that Joy Reid is in essence a neo-racist or that Rachel Maddow has spent three years relentlessly lying about vaccines and COVID. So what people, I think, have to understand is they're paid to lie.

01:03:13 Speaker_03
They are well-paid to push a particular narrative.

01:03:17 Speaker_01
Part of the difference with the old media, let's say, the corporate media, and the new media is that those organizations are corporations and the people that you see are the front men for the organization. They're not

01:03:34 Speaker_01
investigative they're not independent investigative journalists now I know you claim that you know that you're not a journalist and technically that's true but that's the roughest equivalent because I don't know apart from podcaster I don't know what the definition is so yeah I would it's something like I'm trying to

01:03:53 Speaker_03
translate the nonsense, but that's not a- Talk show host? Yeah, I'm a talk show host.

01:03:58 Speaker_01
Yeah, whatever Phil Donahue was, that's what I am. Yeah, yeah, well that's, yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right. That's what I'm doing with my podcast too, they're talk shows.

01:04:06 Speaker_03
But why is it then that for the last four, let's say starting when COVID started, like that day, all of the hoaxes that we've all been through, why is it that I didn't fall for any of them?

01:04:16 Speaker_03
Why is it that my track record, I get political predictions wrong all the time. I thought DeSantis could win the primary. I have no problem admitting that. There was a different way the Republicans could go. And by the way, I'm thrilled with the result.

01:04:26 Speaker_03
I couldn't be happier. I fought for Trump and all that stuff. So putting aside political predictions, why is it that I didn't? Why didn't I fall for all of the hoaxes?

01:04:34 Speaker_03
Why when the Jesse Smollett thing came out and they said that two black guys, or that he was lynched by two guys with MAGA hats who said this is MAGA country, and it turned out to be these black brothers that he paid, why is it that I didn't immediately fall for the hoax?

01:04:47 Speaker_03
Yeah, Kamala Harris immediately tweeted out that this proves we're a white supremacist nation, and I think that's still, I think that tweet is still up. Why is it that MSNBC fell for every hoax? Why is it that I didn't fall for all of the COVID hoaxes?

01:04:59 Speaker_03
By day 15, I thought, okay, two weeks to stop the spread, we're done now. And now they've moved on to something else. It's not because I'm some kind of genius. Why did you not fall for all these hoaxes?

01:05:09 Speaker_03
Why did Rogan not really fall for all these hoaxes? And everyone, I'd say to some degree, we all got screwed up by COVID in some ways. And I think you've even said that you got, I think I did your first interview back.

01:05:20 Speaker_03
after your health stuff, and you said that you got vaxxed, and you thought the whole idea was now the government, if I can quote you directly, was leave me the fuck alone.

01:05:29 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. That is what I thought. I thought, okay.

01:05:31 Speaker_03
And it's interesting. I remember thinking when you said that to me on air, I thought, that's interesting, because I never thought that.

01:05:36 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah.

01:05:37 Speaker_03
I thought if I do it, they'll never leave me alone. And I think that that actually turned out to be more true in some sense.

01:05:44 Speaker_01
Oh, definitely. Oh, yeah, 100%. But what is it?

01:05:47 Speaker_03
What is it about us then?

01:05:48 Speaker_01
Well, I think partly we put our finger on it with regard to the fact that you don't have a whole corporation behind you composed of people and advertisers that are all thinking the same thing and purveying the same message, right?

01:06:01 Speaker_01
So you can go out and scavenge for information. That's the other thing, too, is the information environment that surrounds you This is a point they made on MSNBC. I think it was the guy who runs Axios who was the commentator.

01:06:14 Speaker_01
I think we're going to probably clip that into this show. He pointed out that, you know, people who are on the cutting edge of the technological world, let's say the online media world, they're information scavengers.

01:06:29 Speaker_01
I gather information from, well, I'm on X a fair bit, but I gather information from a lot of different sources. It's not an easy thing to do. And so the information pipeline that you have isn't a legacy media monolith by any stretch of the imagination.

01:06:44 Speaker_01
And I think a lot of these people rather than, I mean, the charitable interpretation is rather than being outright purveyors of falsehoods, they're in an ecosystem where it's like a monoculture, everybody thinks the same thing.

01:06:59 Speaker_03
Right, it's like a fish swimming in water that's so polluted, a tank that's so polluted that he can't see right in front of him, even though his memory is short anyway, but now he literally can't see where he's swimming.

01:07:09 Speaker_03
I mean, think about it, how is it that we all, why is it that I did a video in 2019, people can find it, saying Joe Biden has clearly the beginnings of dementia or something cognitively wrong with him. 2019, again, I'm not a doctor.

01:07:22 Speaker_03
I was just watching the videos like everybody else. I watched the Corn Pop video.

01:07:25 Speaker_01
How much time do you spend every week looking at media information?

01:07:29 Speaker_03
No, an awful lot.

01:07:32 Speaker_01
How much?

01:07:32 Speaker_03
I mean, I would say I'm definitely within the ex-Twitter, ecosystem a couple hours a day. So that's a pretty significant amount of time. I try not to do it on the weekends.

01:07:42 Speaker_03
You know, I do my August off the grid thing, which I think also has helped me stay sane throughout this because I get out of the hamster wheel basically, you know, once a year for eight years now.

01:07:53 Speaker_03
But the Biden cognitive issue, they lied and lied and lied. And they kept saying, don't see what you see.

01:08:01 Speaker_04
and he's still president right now.

01:08:04 Speaker_03
Although something seems to have turned on because I think he's starting to realize, man, he's got a legacy and he can figure it out in the next two months.

01:08:10 Speaker_03
And I think his legacy, if he's smart, and I don't know what's left of him, but if Jill and whoever else is around him, that has sense with them. They have an incredible opportunity right now, and I hope they'll take this.

01:08:22 Speaker_03
The opportunity is you have no reason to placate to the left. You were brought in because you were old Joe the moderate. You weren't crazy Bernie. You weren't Elizabeth Warren. You weren't one of the radicals. You governed like one of them.

01:08:32 Speaker_03
They took advantage of you. But now they clearly tried to screw you by forcing him out. He's basically said that. I mean, that's what he said on The View, that they forced him out. He thought he was going to win.

01:08:42 Speaker_03
So we'll find out what happened there one day, because eventually the truth will come out. But what an interesting moment he has right now. He has two months to say, I have no reason to play with you children anymore, and I can build a legacy.

01:08:54 Speaker_03
So what could my legacy be? Well, maybe Donald Trump's not Hitler. And maybe I could do a few things like, I don't know, maybe somehow winding down some portion of the Iraq war.

01:09:04 Speaker_03
or helping Israel win their war, getting our hostages back, the American hostages, if not the Israelis, or maybe doing something about the border, which they are doing a little more now.

01:09:12 Speaker_03
He has an interesting moment right now where his legacy could be, he took us to the precipice of hell. he got taken advantage of, right? They'll write about it one day.

01:09:22 Speaker_03
But then right there, when he had a moment, the two months between administrations, he did something right. And I really, I don't think that's completely, a lot of people are saying I'm nuts for that.

01:09:31 Speaker_03
But if you were Joe Biden, and again, we don't know what's really in his mind or what he's capable of cognitively at this point, but wouldn't that be a pretty good ending to the story?

01:09:41 Speaker_01
That would be a good ending. That would also help the Democrats get back on track. So if it's a story- Or maybe we'll get lucky too.

01:09:48 Speaker_01
So in the last month of the campaign, we had all these strange people aggregate around Trump, and that was a game-changer, as far as I was concerned, because it really helped put my concerns about a Trump administration to rest.

01:09:59 Speaker_01
And then we had the spectacle of him turning to the podcast world, and he did that with accruing success. Like, you could see that

01:10:09 Speaker_01
He had some trepidation to begin with, but as he found out what that ecosystem was like, you know, we can forgive him for not discovering that earlier, because he is 78, you know, I mean.

01:10:20 Speaker_03
And he did do some of it, by the way. I mean, he did my show when he was president. So he was bouncing in and out, but he, yes, you're totally right that he went hardcore.

01:10:29 Speaker_03
I'm going to sit down with the Nelk Boys while they're talking about, you know, Spike Seltzer and then Rogan and everything.

01:10:34 Speaker_01
And with Theo Vaughn. And Theo, which was great, which was really great. Yeah, it was great. It was great. And then, of course, And the capstone was obviously Rogan.

01:10:43 Speaker_01
And then they tried to censor that on YouTube, right, which was just beyond comprehension, that they mucked up the search algorithms. I just couldn't believe that.

01:10:52 Speaker_03
But again, they knew they were going to get caught. And this is the thing that I'm still stuck on. I'm not stuck on that they lie, and I'm not stuck on that they put themselves in an ecosystem where the lies then become pervasive.

01:11:04 Speaker_03
I'm stuck on the other part. Obama knows he's going to get caught. YouTube knows that they're going to get called out for the algorithmic tricks. And yet they still do it.

01:11:14 Speaker_01
And that shows you. YouTube took down the interview, the first interview I did with RFK during the presidential election. They took it down. I thought Democrats were screeching for months about Russian collusion and election interference.

01:11:28 Speaker_01
And yet you're willing to censor an actual presidential candidate with an actual two hour interview. And that's somehow that's okay. Somehow that's okay.

01:11:39 Speaker_03
It's funny you say the Democrats and you're talking about YouTube and that shows you. That shows you the connection between these things, right? So that is what drove us all together.

01:11:47 Speaker_01
So that's another thing to point out too, when the Democrats are carping about not having access to this new media, it's like, well, all the YouTube censors.

01:11:56 Speaker_01
let's point out are on your side and you bloody well had Twitter too until Musk took it over.

01:12:01 Speaker_03
Jordan, I don't know what year it was, 2019 maybe? There was a cover story on Sunday New York Times with me, you, Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, I think Tim Pool, a couple other people, that we were the YouTube leaders of the alt-right.

01:12:16 Speaker_03
And they did an entire piece about, multi-page piece, about how the YouTube algorithms were driving people to the right. Think how absolutely bananas that is. Now in retrospect, they had the entire machine. They had the entire machine.

01:12:32 Speaker_03
They used it against all of us while telling us that we were the ones using them in essence. And I guess they got their comeuppance and that's the beautiful part of this.

01:12:42 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, thank God for free speech. That's for sure. Yeah.

01:12:47 Speaker_03
That's why we're happy to have you in America, because it's not going so well up in your country.

01:12:52 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's for sure, man. Liberals up there. Well, so here's something interesting, I guess, insofar as Canadian politics is interesting, but the world is such now and so upside down that even Canadian politics has become interesting.

01:13:07 Speaker_01
It's like, oh, that's not good. And so Stephen Guilbeault, who's the Minister of Environment, who's been waging war against the resource economy in Canada, which is, by the way, the economy in Canada.

01:13:20 Speaker_01
And he declared a week and a half ago publicly that he was a socialist. And I thought, French-Canadian socialist, and I thought, you son of a bitch. There's a socialist party in Canada. That's the NDP.

01:13:34 Speaker_01
It's like, what the hell are you doing in the Liberal Party, which was a centrist party, like the centrist Democrats forever, and the Natural Governing Party of Canada. It's like the progressives just invaded it.

01:13:45 Speaker_01
They didn't care that it was a complete bloody lie, that they had taken over the Liberal Party and turned it into left of the Socialist Party, actually. And now they're proclaiming that outright.

01:13:55 Speaker_03
So what does that tell you about the psychological, what I would say is weakness, but maybe I would want to hear your adjective on that, of the good liberal? The good liberal who allowed all of this to come in.

01:14:07 Speaker_01
This is a compassion issue? Well, you know, when all this started, And I think it was the same with you. You know, I regarded myself as a classic British liberal, essentially.

01:14:21 Speaker_01
But I've come to understand something over the last eight years that I didn't understand in the beginning, and certainly not as well anyways, is that that liberal individualism

01:14:37 Speaker_01
only works when the collective is so well-established that you can take it for granted. So as long as the self-evident truths remain self-evident, then you can have something like a liberal individualism.

01:14:51 Speaker_03
So it's basically, as long as the conservatives are holding the door from the barbarians, then the liberals can be liberal. Yeah, exactly that. And that's how a functional society should work, in essence.

01:15:01 Speaker_01
Well, you know, in the story of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, so the Shire is full of well, let's call them liberals, right? And they're all hobbits.

01:15:12 Speaker_03
They're smoking some stuff.

01:15:13 Speaker_01
Yeah, they're hobbits and they're all pursuing their own thing and they think their little kingdom is everything. But the borders are protected by the striders. Aragorn is one of them. And it turns out that he's the descendant of ancient kings.

01:15:26 Speaker_01
And that's exactly right. It's like, as long as the perimeters are defended by the descendants of ancient kings, then there can be freedom inside the walls. And so,

01:15:36 Speaker_01
You know, I've been criticized, the more public books I've written have been criticized for, what would you say, making a case out of the self-evident.

01:15:46 Speaker_01
But we are at a point where the self-evident is no longer self-evident and needs to be explained and defended. And that's actually, what would you say, that's what's turned me into a conservative to the degree that I am a conservative.

01:16:02 Speaker_01
It's like, well, all these things that are self-evident have to be, restated and also explained.

01:16:08 Speaker_03
Right. You wouldn't have had to have written 12 rules for life had the system been operating properly.

01:16:14 Speaker_02
That's the point.

01:16:15 Speaker_03
You would think in the year 2000, when you wrote it, 2017, 16, whatever it was, that had the world actually been operating as it should have with all the advancements of humanity,

01:16:27 Speaker_03
It would not be necessary to say things that are just, why would you pet a cat when you walk by it? Well, there's a reason. There's actually a reason. You remember, wait, I'll tell you a funny story in a sec. But, you know, Douglas.

01:16:38 Speaker_03
the line on this about the walls that Douglas has that I love, I love this. And he said this years ago, was that one day the barbarians will be at the gate and we'll be debating what gender pronouns to call them.

01:16:49 Speaker_03
And I think that's what happened to the liberals.

01:16:51 Speaker_03
They saw the chaos and instead of confronting it as the conservatives, and we can do the conservative version of this where their weak spots are too obviously, but instead of confronting what was going on,

01:17:03 Speaker_03
how good they had it, they decided to just, ah, we'll let the crazy people just keep running around. And then, you know, the guy's trying to hold the door and we'll just sort of chisel it as Achilles heel a little bit by not defending him.

01:17:14 Speaker_03
And we'll kind of call him racist too. Or when other people call him racist and he's not really racist, we won't say anything. And I think that that's really what's happened here. It was sort of like, you know, when they took Alex Jones out originally,

01:17:28 Speaker_03
I had done Alex Jones show one time. It's the only time we ever spoke publicly. I remember I said a little something on Twitter, but I was just like, ah, I don't know how close I want to get to this thing. It's all crazy.

01:17:37 Speaker_03
You know, we all have certain pressure points that we deal with and how much heat you want to take and everything else. I think in retrospect, we all should have been screaming much, much louder.

01:17:44 Speaker_03
And a lot of people in our circles didn't say a word about that when he got booted off Twitter and kicked off YouTube and all of those things that we all just thought, ah, It'll kind of never come for us.

01:17:53 Speaker_03
And to Trump's credit, by the way, what was his main line is they're not coming for me. They're coming for you. I'm just standing in the way.

01:17:58 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the fact that he got kicked off Twitter was a perfect example of that. That was just beyond comprehension as far as I was concerned.

01:18:05 Speaker_03
Well, what? Really? Really? You know, when I went to Twitter, when I got a call one day from someone at Twitter, basically saying, Elon wants to meet you. Can you get here tonight? It was about three o'clock on a Tuesday or something, Tuesday or Thursday.

01:18:21 Speaker_03
And I called everybody I knew who had a private plane. I was like, somebody's got to get me over there. Nobody could get on. I jump on a plane. I get to Twitter at about 1230 a.m. This is like a week or two after he bought Twitter.

01:18:32 Speaker_03
And he comes out, you know, there's all these people there. It's just such a buzz, right? And he comes out, it's about 1230 a.m. His eyes are bloodshot. And he's clearly tired, right? And you've met him many times now. He dresses like a normal guy.

01:18:45 Speaker_03
He's in like this ratty T-shirt. It's late at night. You know, his sneakers are dirty. And he's clearly been there for God knows how long. Probably hasn't slept in- Five years. Yeah, probably hasn't slept in however, right?

01:18:55 Speaker_03
And he says to me, he goes, Dave, I heard about what's been going on with your account. He's like, do you want to do this tonight? Or if it's okay, could we do it tomorrow? This is insane. The world's richest man

01:19:08 Speaker_03
is basically like, can I work for you tonight at 1 a.m.? I was like, oh, it's actually okay, I'll come back tomorrow.

01:19:13 Speaker_03
And then I sat there the next day with a whole bunch of engineers who opened the hood of the thing and the entire system, the entire Twitter system was built to shadow ban. That's it.

01:19:24 Speaker_03
Everything under the hood of Twitter was built to put filters and tags, and you said this, so now you can't see this, or you connected with that person, so now you can't connect with this person. The entire system was built that way.

01:19:35 Speaker_03
So Jack Dorsey, who was the CEO for much of it, he testified under oath that they do not shadow ban, but the whole freaking system was built that way.

01:19:43 Speaker_03
Now, he probably legally didn't get in trouble because shadow ban is not a technical term, and he may have I think he was just playing with the words there.

01:19:52 Speaker_03
But the point is, there was an entire system basically built to silence a certain set of people and promote another set of people. And it didn't work. And it didn't work. So how cool is that? How cool is that? And that's where we're at right now.

01:20:06 Speaker_03
Incredible, actually.

01:20:07 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's for sure. That's for sure. Well, Dave, I guess we could turn back to Canada for a moment. Yeah, sorry, I went on a tangent there. No, no, no, no, no, that's fine. So the radicals have definitely taken over Canada and it's really quite bad.

01:20:25 Speaker_01
So when Trudeau was elected, we were at parity for per person GDP in Canada. And that's historically about where Canada has been, sometimes a little ahead. Parity with America, you mean?

01:20:37 Speaker_01
Parity with America, sometimes a little behind, more often a little behind, but now we're at 60%. Canadians are poorer in per capita GDP than Mississippi residents. And our real estate is twice as expensive.

01:20:53 Speaker_01
And so now the upside is that unfortunately, well, I said the upside. The upside is that it's over, but it won't come to its conclusion for a year, right?

01:21:09 Speaker_01
Polyev is going to be the next prime minister unless some bloody, completely unforeseen catastrophe occurs, and that strikes me as unlikely. And the liberals, who are now the socialists, farther to the left than the NDP, who are the actual socialists,

01:21:24 Speaker_01
they're going to get demolished so hard that they might disappear federally. It's going to be a bloodbath, and it's so well-deserved.

01:21:31 Speaker_01
But, this is a big but, you said, you know, that Biden now has an opportunity in the next two months to do the right thing, and maybe he will. Trudeau has a year. And I believe that Trudeau is a wounded narcissist.

01:21:46 Speaker_01
So, I thought he was narcissistic right from the beginning. And the reason I believe that was because He had no right to put himself forward as prime minister. He had no resume. He didn't know anything. All he had was a name that he didn't make known.

01:22:08 Speaker_01
His father's name. That's all he had. Well, no, it's not all.

01:22:11 Speaker_03
He was a drama teacher.

01:22:12 Speaker_01
Well, he was also good-looking, and he was graceful, and he was charming. And he knew how to behave in public.

01:22:19 Speaker_03
That's run pretty thin though now.

01:22:21 Speaker_01
I know, but it wasn't nothing, right? So you want to give the devil his due. But in terms of competence, that was just completely lacking. And also the ability to see that he didn't have the knowledge or the ability to run a country. That was lacking.

01:22:37 Speaker_01
Now, when he was first approached, I thought, okay, you could refuse or because of the heritage of your family, let's say, you don't want the conservatives to win.

01:22:52 Speaker_01
And so you decide to stand for prime minister, but you understand very clearly that you don't know what the hell you're doing at all. And so you surround yourself with people who are experts and you let them teach you. And he did none of that.

01:23:06 Speaker_01
I mean, he set up a cabinet that was half women. in 2015, and that's why he said he did it, because it was 2015, even though only one in four MPs were women.

01:23:17 Speaker_01
So he set up a bad cabinet to begin with, because he over-selected from 25% of the population. And that was all virtue signaling. And so now, and so he started out as a narcissist and he never changed.

01:23:30 Speaker_01
And now the problem, one of the problems with narcissists is that when everybody likes them, they can be quite benevolent because their greatness is recognized.

01:23:43 Speaker_01
But when people decide that they're detestable, which is pretty much where Trudeau has got in Canada, it's very hard for him to go out in public now without people like literally cursing him. then it's time for revenge.

01:23:57 Speaker_01
And he's got a bill tabled right now called Bill C-63, which has gone through first reading, so it's on the way to becoming law, which is, it makes Bill C-16, which was the one I objected to, look like child's play.

01:24:09 Speaker_01
This is the most totalitarian bill I've ever seen a Western country

01:24:14 Speaker_03
produced by a large margin. This is about registering the news organizations?

01:24:18 Speaker_01
That's part of it. Part of it. Well, it's called it's a bill to bill to reduce online harms. That's its name. And it starts out with a description of how children are going to be protected from sexual predators online. And it ends with that.

01:24:31 Speaker_01
But in the middle, there's a whole new bureaucracy that has all the powers of a judiciary and it's infinitely expandable, that isn't bound by the rules of standard evidence, which it says in the bill, which is just beyond comprehension to me.

01:24:47 Speaker_01
And it has pretty much unlimited powers of seizure and investigation and punishment, life in prison for hate crime with all these protected groups. And the worst of it is that this is, I can't even believe this can possibly be true.

01:25:07 Speaker_01
I can take you in front of a provincial magistrate, and if I convince the provincial magistrate that I'm afraid that you might commit a hate crime in the next year, say with your Twitter utterances, he'll affix a electronic surveillance bracelet to your leg and keep you in your house for a year.

01:25:24 Speaker_01
It's pre-crime.

01:25:25 Speaker_03
It's pre-crime. You saw a minority report, it's pre-crime.

01:25:28 Speaker_01
It's pre-crime, absolutely, absolutely. And this is the weirdest part of it, I can't even believe that this can possibly be true,

01:25:36 Speaker_01
you will have to provide samples of your bodily fluids when requested to assure that you're not, I don't know what, drinking, smoking pot. I think what happened was that's a requirement if you're in a domestic abuse case, right?

01:25:49 Speaker_01
Because, you know, if you're drunk, you're much more likely to be a domestic abuser.

01:25:54 Speaker_01
And so, arguably, there might be some sense, if you've been convicted of domestic abuse, of making that a condition of, let's say, you're released back into the community. But as a defense against What?

01:26:06 Speaker_01
The kind of pre-crime that, well, that's exactly it. It's like someone's afraid that you might do something that is hateful. Well, that's just part of it.

01:26:15 Speaker_03
They need to take him up on that. That would be something. That's how the movie ends. He gets taken up on the same law.

01:26:21 Speaker_03
But so your concern though is that, so it's interesting because on one hand you think that what I laid out with Biden is possible, right? Because there's a truncated period of time.

01:26:32 Speaker_03
Basically what you're saying to me is because Trudeau now has too much time, it could go, it could really go much worse.

01:26:38 Speaker_01
I'm virtually certain that that's what will happen.

01:26:40 Speaker_03
Do you think if he had a truncated period of time like Biden does that it would get better because he would be looking at the end much more closely?

01:26:46 Speaker_01
No.

01:26:47 Speaker_03
So that's interesting. So you think there's something. So I agree with that, too.

01:26:51 Speaker_01
I think all of them will be out for revenge. I mean, I can already see that Stephen Guilbeau, who's He's the worst sort of progressive imaginable. He would sacrifice the poor to his green delusions. He is, that's exactly what he is doing.

01:27:05 Speaker_01
That's what he's doing.

01:27:06 Speaker_01
He's already declared war, essentially, on the Western provinces, and Alberta in particular, even though his own province, Quebec, depends on the money Alberta sends them to maintain anything that resembles an advanced industrial economy.

01:27:20 Speaker_01
So I think they'll really do damage to Canada in the next year, and then Polio will have to come in and

01:27:26 Speaker_01
mop up, and he's going to have a very tough fight on his hands because things are worse in Canada than Canadians believe, and they're likely worse than I know.

01:27:37 Speaker_01
And we won't know how bad they are till Polyaev takes power, and then they'll all be blamed on him. Yeah, so Canadians are in for a rough time. And they haven't woken up, I wouldn't say.

01:27:52 Speaker_01
I wouldn't say that the typical Canadian, for example, was a Trump supporter. They're still trapped in that centrist, progressive mindset that is completely ignorant of the danger of the radical leftists.

01:28:08 Speaker_03
Well, I can tell you that we have an awful lot of snowbirds, we call them down in Florida, who are Canadians who are not going back. They're everywhere I go now, there are Canadians everywhere and they're like,

01:28:19 Speaker_03
I don't know that they're not, technically they're supposed to go back at some point, of course, but they're staying a lot longer than they used to, for sure. Even this summer.

01:28:28 Speaker_03
You don't have a lot of Canadians usually coming to a Florida summer, but they are because they realize what's going on there. So you need Canada to wake up to its sense of adventure.

01:28:37 Speaker_01
That's for sure. Well, there are signs of improvement. You know, Daniel Smith's tough as a boot, the Premier of Alberta, and Pauliev, as far as I can tell, he's a man with a spine. He's not easy to push around.

01:28:49 Speaker_01
And I think he's sensible, and I actually do think that he actually cares about working class people. So, like the Trump. Like Trump, weirdly enough, because Trump actually cares about working class people.

01:29:02 Speaker_01
And so having worked with him for so long as well, and so, and understands them as well, which is, and the Democrats made that decision under Hillary Clinton to throw the white working class in particular, just under the bus.

01:29:13 Speaker_01
And so, c'est la vie, man.

01:29:15 Speaker_03
God, they had no reason to do that. Well, I guess the reason was to attain power and they did it for quite some time.

01:29:20 Speaker_01
They made a calculated risk to go for the marginal and

01:29:25 Speaker_03
Your line about the fringe of the fringe, I quote on my show often too, because that's the other part that could sort of trap us.

01:29:32 Speaker_03
As we sort of split and we were all online getting our own news sources and scavenging, as you said, there's always gonna be new fringes. Like that's really gonna be the new thing.

01:29:42 Speaker_03
The one argument you could make for the mainstream or the corporate would be that it did keep the Obra Dinn window a little bit like this.

01:29:47 Speaker_03
So we all at least dealt with some, even if the reality was very skewed to what was really real, at least it was a little bit, Now we're dancing out here all the time.

01:29:57 Speaker_03
And I think that's going to be, and then when you throw AI on top of that, that's going to be, that's going to really be the next challenge. Let me give you something before we wrap up this 500th Jordan Peterson podcast.

01:30:09 Speaker_03
You can read the card privately, but that's from a couple of weeks ago. And I think it's a nice... Oh, that's a good picture, man.

01:30:18 Speaker_01
Not bad, right? We're both much better looking in that picture than we actually are. So that's good. Nothing a little Photoshop can't do. A little high contrast Photoshop. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Did you run it through the AI filter? What does that do?

01:30:32 Speaker_03
Makes your eyes a little wider. I have a team of many people who can do all sorts of tricks. You know what I mean? We're going to look as good as we can right there.

01:30:38 Speaker_03
But even just doing that together after all these years, it was like the perfect sort of next phase of where we're at with all of this. We talked about the ideas. I built a tech company in the middle of all of this that we tried to do together.

01:30:53 Speaker_01
We didn't even tell that story today.

01:30:55 Speaker_03
Let me just say one thing, because it's probably never been said publicly before, but everyone knows all the great things about you.

01:31:01 Speaker_03
But when you were starting to get sick and we were working on the idea together, you had had your version of it at first. And I put in $100,000. And then you realize that you were not going to be available for a while.

01:31:16 Speaker_03
And I think the last time we spoke for then a year was you saying, Dave, take the money back. Because if I can't be involved in this, you should take them. I don't even know if you remember that even. But you didn't have to do that.

01:31:26 Speaker_03
You didn't have to do that. And then with that money, I then started Locals. And then that all worked.

01:31:32 Speaker_03
So anyway, I brought you that because I thought it was nice that we then ended up on stage just weeks before the election with RFK and Tulsi and so many of these people we've talked about. Oh, so that was at DC. That was DC just a couple weeks ago.

01:31:44 Speaker_03
And what a wild and crazy ride it has been.

01:31:46 Speaker_01
Doubts? That's for sure. And the thing is, it's not over. Is it? Yeah. Good to see you, Dave. Good to see you, my man. Yeah. Thanks for coming in. So as you know, everybody, we've got another half an hour on The Daily Wire side.

01:32:01 Speaker_01
And so I'll continue my conversation with Mr. Rubin.

01:32:06 Speaker_01
there, and you're obviously all invited to come over to the dark side, the Daily Wire people, and throw a little support their way, which is, I always think, a good investment, given that they've been staunch defenders of the very free speech that we've been talking about, and right from the beginning.

01:32:22 Speaker_01
And so, with all this shake-up in the media world, what the Daily Wire is doing is, well, continues to be a Who knows how much import? So join us on the DataWire side. Thanks again, Dave. It's really good to see you.