Dave Rubin
The Connection Between Truth and Humor, Why Conservatives Need Fashion Advice, and How Thanos Built a Progressive Utopia
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Intro
In this episode, Zach talks with political commentator and comedian, Dave Rubin. They discuss the validation of Internet trolls, the connection between truth and humor, and the inconsistent idealism of the progressive movement. Dave shares his experience going on tour with outspoken cultural psychologist Jordan Peterson, and the way he learned that honest reflection leads to change through speaking with diverse people around the world. Other topics include a new sales pitch for conservatives based on fashion, and how Thanos is the poster child for what’s wrong with the left.
Key Takeaways
Internet Trolls Fuel a Successful Book Launch
So far, the response to Dave’s book, ‘Don’t Burn this Book,’ is a validation of what he wrote
(4:10) “Everything being equal, the book is doing incredibly well. We’re at the top of every relevant political list. I’ve got a coordinated army of trolls and haters from Reddit and Discord and everywhere else that are just trying to assault our Amazon reviews and the rest of it. Which, it’s literally the thesis of the book that you don’t bow to the mob.” - Dave
The book’s title is a metaphorical reflection of what Dave predicted would happen
(4:31) “I called the book ‘Don’t Burn this Book’ not thinking that people were going to literally burn it like we were in 1941 Germany. But a new type of book burning is when a mob sees something they don’t like. A speaker who says something they don’t like. A book that contains ideas they don’t like. A comedian who tells jokes they don’t like. What do they do? They bombard them on social media.”- Dave
Civil discourse and independent thought begin with honest discovery
(5:33) “I’m not trying to convince you that I’m right about every single freaking public policy. I want you to think about them seriously yourself, and if you come to a different conclusion, let’s hash it out. That’s called being an American.”- Dave
Being Offended Stems from an Unwilling Mind
Dave’s talk with Larry Elder on systemic racism opened his eyes to the power of opposing views
(8:41) “That was one of the defining moments for me of ‘you know if you listen to people who say things that you don’t agree with, if they know something more than you, you might learn something.’ And maybe you know something more than them and that’s the beautiful dance that we can do as humans. So, you’ve got to learn from people you don’t agree with.” – Dave
Being offended is a choice that you can work on eliminating every day
(9:24) “You can actually put yourself in a position to control how offended you are. So when you say ‘you offended me,’ you have the power over how you are taking that in.” – Zach
Humor is effective when it tells the truth and starts a conversation
Complex Issues Require More Than a Knee-Jerk Response (Dave’s Unifying Flash Points)
The left has thrown out discourse in favor of counterproductive petty name calling
(13:33) “The unifying principle of those three stories is that what I saw happening on the left was that there were really complex issues that we should be able to talk about. That instead of talking about those complex issues, the left just decide to label everybody bigots and racists and homophobes and the rest of it.”- Dave
Progressive ideology is grounded in unrealistic idealism, not truth and experience
Inconsistent views and double standards have undermined pure, honest liberalism
(14:34) On the attack on conservative David Webb- “He’s a black man saying things they (colleagues) didn’t like, so they felt that that gave them a license to call him a bigot and a racist and a self-hater and a grifter and an Uncle Tom and all of the worst things in the world. And I thought ‘well, wait a minute. You guys are calling everyone racist all the time, but you’re racist. You’re actually racist because how dare this black man say something that you don’t like oh tolerant liberal one.”- Dave
Truth Still Needs a Pretty Package to be Heard
Fashion and politics operate on the same basic principle
(17:04) Paraphrasing Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Christopher Wylie- “The style and trendiness and appearance of an idea is just as important, or even more important, than the idea itself because you have to get someone to accept an idea in order for it to take hold.”- Zach
The perceived invisibility of conservative thought has more to do with trendiness than truth
(23:06) “It’s almost like the conservatives need a Chief Design Officer, or a Chief Fashion Officer, to step up and say ‘Alright, guys. We have the ideas, we have the utility, we know it works, we have the base of the jacket. Now, we just need to make it look good and give it some flair so people want to walk around with it on and want to show other people that they believe what they believe.”- Zach
Conservatism and Progressivism differ on the importance of a sound idea vs. a flashy sale
The coronavirus crisis has revealed truth in a fight between preference and survival
A progressive mindset more easily lends itself to infiltrating common thought
(23:50) “It’s harder if you’re based in individuality to wrangle it. Versus the left is based in collectivism, and collectivism sort of is like ‘oh, I wear a jacket, thus, here I am.’”- Dave
Change Comes from a Commitment to Honest Reflection
The monolithic hold of the left on the culture war crumbles when irony meets truth
(26:48) “That’s the irony. Leftism has been so adopted by Hollywood and by musicians and all that stuff, but you know, what is a musician? What is an actor? What is an artist? You’re supposed to be the ultimate individual. You’re supposed to put out something cool because it’s new and it can make people feel something.”- Dave
Dave’s tour with Jordan Peterson proves that responsible reflection makes a difference
(31:11) On Jordan Peterson’s ability to change lives- “He never wanted to be Jesus. There is, you know, no other Jesus. So I think he did something truly, truly special. And the irony is all he did was put his thoughts out there and try to fight for them honestly which is something we should all be trying to do.”- Dave
Genuine interaction with diverse people keeps you focused on what’s important
Liberal Utopia is a Damaging, False Promise
Conformity is the enemy of individual thought and reason
(43:25) “It’s like you see a difference and then you want the answer to that difference to be oppression. So then you try to reverse engineer the problem because you know there has to be oppression. It can’t just be people like doing different things.”- Zach
(43:38) On the difficulty of truth in Sweden- “It’s the utopia that Bernie and AOC always say we should be like. Everyone is equal there, but still, there are biological, hard-wired differences. Men happen to like things more. That’s not saying men are better. Women happen to like people more. That’s not saying women are worse, but they are different. So now the social justice warriors can’t even accept the experiment that they wanted didn’t come out with the answer that they wanted, so now they want to go in and re-engineer and that’s really dangerous.”- Dave
A functional understanding of individualism is the key to a stronger society
(44:11) “I think it’s going to swing back in terms of people being okay with differences and not always having to try to make it about oppression because for thousands of years, women being different than men meant that they were second-class citizens. And now we’re in a time where women are not second-class citizens, but there are still differences.”- Zach
Idealism can be unrealistic, but important if viewed from a lens of change
Politics are Beautiful Because of Our Differences, Not in Spite of Them
Opposites attract on a political spectrum when the pursuit of knowledge is shared
(46:33) “If you find these people and you know they know what they think, but they’re interested in what you think and you can do that. What’s cooler than that?”- Dave
An unhealthy focus on an idea or interest can mitigate the good that it brings
(47:43) “Whatever you care about, find some way to not just be completely focused on that one thing because that one thing will burn you out.”- Dave
The inability to recognize the importance of someone else’s beliefs shows a lack of character and personal growth
(48:37) “To me that actually signals that you’re not ready to have a conversation if you come into an interaction thinking that your beliefs are stronger than what someone else believes. One may be right, one may be wrong, but that other person may think that that answer, the wrong answer, is part of their being and identity. So you have to recognize that they have a death hold on that belief.”- Zach
(50:33) When recalling his interaction with a longtime friend- “If you can’t admit that your friend could have a bunch of beliefs that are counter to yours. Like you can’t even believe that they could forthrightly have that. That says more about you than it says about them.”- Dave
The Perils of Living in a Chaotic World
The prevalence of lies in our everyday life makes truth almost unachievable
(51:43) On lying yourself- “In effect, you’re distorting reality. You’re sending a distorted reality out to the world, and then the world will send a distorted reality back to you. And we live in a weird time with this right now. It’s like, we don’t really trust the media. We don’t really trust our politicians. Everyone is fighting on Twitter. It’s getting increasingly hard to figure out what is real.”- Dave
Self-improvement becomes reciprocal when you affirm the possibility of change
(54:08) “It’s not that you’ve got to do it all tomorrow, but you’ve got to give yourself at least a little bit of the framework so that you’re able to build the life that you want to build.”- Dave
Why Thanos Symbolizes a Crucial Problem with the Left
In Dave’s experience, the left not only disrespects but suppresses opposing views
(56:36) “I’m not pretending that the right is perfect, or that they don’t have their own issues with these sorts of things. But the stuff that culture is constantly slamming us with that we’ve littered throughout this conversation, that is coming from the left.”- Dave
When we lose the ability to validate and filter the information we receive, we lose our freedom
(56:59) “I’ve always been very aware that the average person and how people behave on Twitter are completely separate things. But you know, we also have to remember that we live in a time, especially now with corona, where we went from big tech having a lot of control over our lives to now they have pretty much all the control over our lives.”- Dave
True collectivism comes at an astronomical cost
(57:46) “All of the places that things go horrifically awry, like Venezuela and Cuba and all of the people who have been killed, it’s not that they’re being killed in the name of what’s being sold as a bad ideology. They’re being sold a utopia. And a utopia never exists because the only way you get to a utopia, you’ve got to kill a lot of people to get there, to create your perfect society. Because we are imperfect.”- Dave
The failure to see value in other people’s ideas is the biggest obstacle to an agreement, not the ideas themselves
(59:37) “That’s the message that I want to get across more than anything else. Is that we’re supposed to think different things and that actually is okay.”- Dave
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