The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Episode 500： What a Long Strange Trip it's Been

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00:00:15.160 If you say the truth and nothing else, you'll have an immense adventure as a consequence.

00:00:25.320 Jordan Peterson said it first.

00:00:26.640 That's somewhat of an existential crisis.

00:00:28.040 Oh my God!

00:00:28.920 To get yourself out of trouble, you're going to come on my podcast.

00:00:31.940 That's the adventure of our life.

00:00:33.480 I'm going to put my story on, babe.

00:00:34.880 Life is a constant process of death and rebirth.

00:00:37.500 Why is it a horror show?

00:00:38.700 You're playing with the dark side.

00:00:40.520 Wake up!

00:00:41.360 It's not bravery.

00:00:42.380 I know what to be afraid of, 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.

00:00:50.540 Do you wrestle with God?

00:00:52.420 With every word.

00:00:53.380 It's a bit of a special occasion today, at least as far as I'm concerned, and maybe for some of you.

00:01:07.340 It's the 500th episode of my podcast.

00:01:10.400 And so, that's a lot of podcasts.

00:01:12.620 That's a lot of water under the bridge and a lot of learning.

00:01:16.100 And I have as my guest today, my friend and compatriot, Dave Rubin.

00:01:22.300 And we had the opportunity to take a walk down memory lane.

00:01:28.000 Dave was one of the first podcast notables back in 2016 to bring the concerns that I was discussing in Canada to a broader international audience.

00:01:44.100 And out of that initial encounter came a friendship and then a joint tour.

00:01:50.960 I was on tour with Dave throughout 2018.

00:01:54.960 We went to, we can't even remember, 150 different cities, maybe 200.

00:01:59.560 A lot.

00:02:00.460 A lot of places.

00:02:01.560 A lot of water under the bridge.

00:02:03.560 And talked to hundreds of thousands of people.

00:02:07.640 And we've both been at the center of the podcast revolution, the new media revolution, the inevitable demise of the legacy media.

00:02:19.640 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.

00:02:31.760 And so, join us for an evaluation of the radically strange trip that the last eight years has been.

00:02:41.340 Well, Mr. Rubin, it turns out that you're here for the 500th episode of my podcast.

00:02:47.340 I was told this is the last episode.

00:02:48.960 Yeah.

00:02:49.080 Is that...

00:02:49.700 Well, hopefully not.

00:02:51.040 Is that not true?

00:02:51.940 Well, it depends on whether or not the world comes to an end now that Trump's been elected.

00:02:55.600 I think things are looking up, man.

00:02:57.580 Things are looking really up right now.

00:02:59.220 Had it gone the other way, this might have been the last podcast.

00:03:01.620 Well, definitely.

00:03:02.480 Yeah, definitely.

00:03:03.620 Well, yeah.

00:03:04.760 We'll walk down that avenue, no doubt.

00:03:07.400 So, I'm going to start.

00:03:08.160 I'm going to give you this book.

00:03:10.420 So, this is obviously an unashamed promo, but this is coming out this week.

00:03:17.440 So, I'd like you to have it.

00:03:19.140 I'm thrilled.

00:03:19.920 Thank you.

00:03:20.440 Yeah, you bet.

00:03:20.960 I appreciate that.

00:03:21.860 Yeah.

00:03:22.600 You turn these out like nobody.

00:03:25.080 I mean, you really do.

00:03:26.780 Yeah, well, I'm...

00:03:28.220 That's your wrestling with God, writing these things, I think.

00:03:31.700 Yeah.

00:03:32.500 Yeah, definitely.

00:03:34.340 Are you happy with this one?

00:03:35.300 So, that one's sort of...

00:03:36.000 Yes.

00:03:36.900 I'm...

00:03:37.580 It's more difficult than the last two books that I wrote.

00:03:42.980 It's a little bit more demanding on the reader, I would say.

00:03:47.180 But it's less demanding than Maps of Meaning.

00:03:49.280 So, but I'm very curious to see what sort of impact it has, because now that we know that

00:03:57.500 we see the world through a story, we better get the story straight.

00:04:01.860 And that's what I'm trying to do with this book.

00:04:04.220 And so, one of the things I figured out, which I think is extremely useful to know, is that...

00:04:12.280 So, once there's converging evidence from multiple disciplines that we see the world through a story,

00:04:18.620 that what a story is, is actually a description of the way that someone prioritizes their attention

00:04:23.680 and their actions, right?

00:04:25.300 So, when you go see a movie, you see the person who's acting, the protagonist, the hero.

00:04:30.780 You see what he attends to.

00:04:32.280 And so, you see how he rank orders his priorities.

00:04:35.540 And then, of course, you see the same thing with regards to his actions.

00:04:38.400 And you infer his frame of reference, and then you can occupy his value frame,

00:04:42.900 and you can see the world through his eyes.

00:04:44.660 And human beings are very good at that.

00:04:46.520 We're very good at seeing the world through other people's eyes.

00:04:49.780 That's even why our eyes have evolved the way they've evolved.

00:04:53.360 Because our eyes are maximally visible, so that we can see what other people are looking at,

00:04:57.140 so that we can infer the value structure that's directing their attention,

00:05:05.080 and we can occupy the same emotional and motivational space as they do.

00:05:09.340 Human beings are unbelievably good at that.

00:05:11.820 And you have to prioritize your attention, because there's too many things to attend to.

00:05:19.060 And you prioritize your attention by weighting the things that you interact with.

00:05:23.740 Some things you attend to, some things you don't.

00:05:25.920 That's a one-zero weighting, essentially.

00:05:27.980 And there's gradations of that weighting.

00:05:30.920 Anyways, the way we communicate about these weighting strategies is with stories.

00:05:36.500 So once you know that, the only question becomes, well, what's the story then?

00:05:41.700 What is it? What should it be?

00:05:43.960 Right?

00:05:44.280 And the postmodernist insistence is that the story is one of power.

00:05:48.420 And I don't think that's true, because power is self-devouring.

00:05:52.200 It can't sustain itself, or it can only sustain itself with force.

00:05:55.920 And part of the problem with that is that if you use power, someone more powerful will definitely take you out.

00:06:04.660 And you also don't get the best out of people when you compel them.

00:06:07.880 So they're not efficient strategies.

00:06:10.380 They backfire.

00:06:11.320 And you could say there's no story that's canonical, but then you fall into the nihilist hell, and that's not useful.

00:06:19.980 And you could say that the story is one of sexuality and hedonism.

00:06:24.120 But if you orient your life in that direction, you'll end up alone.

00:06:29.280 And so that's another self-devouring story.

00:06:33.220 And so one of the insistences in the biblical narrative is that the fundamental story of the community is one of sacrifice.

00:06:42.660 And I think technically it has to be true, because to enter into a relationship with someone, you have to sacrifice.

00:06:50.800 You sacrifice your own centrality, right?

00:06:53.400 Well, you have kids.

00:06:54.360 Yeah.

00:06:54.620 So what's the consequence of that for your story?

00:06:59.160 Wow.

00:06:59.680 You're going hard right from the beginning.

00:07:01.640 Well, first off, I should note that you were integral in me having kids, because we were on tour back in 2018.

00:07:09.620 We did something like 120 shows, 20-some-odd countries, bouncing around.

00:07:14.860 We were just saying right before the cameras started rolling that it was so much smaller.

00:07:19.900 We had no idea what we were doing in some sense.

00:07:22.020 I mean, you knew what you were doing on stage, and I was making some jokes, and we'd do the Q&A together.

00:07:26.620 But there was no security.

00:07:28.260 There was no managers.

00:07:29.780 There was no entourage.

00:07:31.580 There was no film crew.

00:07:32.760 I mean, we really were just out there bouncing around doing things.

00:07:36.140 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,

00:07:42.460 there's a million things, obviously, that everyone can say about Jordan Peterson.

00:07:45.460 But one of the things that watching you as someone on stage, to the extent that you're a performer, do,

00:07:51.040 is that you would basically do an hour, hour and a half lecture every night,

00:07:54.920 and then just pick it up the next night where you left off.

00:07:57.500 Except I was basically, me and the tour manager were the only two people that saw it the night before.

00:08:02.560 You know, we didn't have roadies going to every show.

00:08:05.140 But one of the things that you consistently talked about is the need for people to truly,

00:08:10.180 for almost everyone, you would say, to live a fully actualized life is to have a child,

00:08:16.180 to learn what the experience of being a parent is, and then ultimately a grandparent,

00:08:20.480 and maybe a great grandparent, that that's just so integral to being a fully-fledged human.

00:08:27.420 And I'm hearing you do this night after night.

00:08:30.020 And David, my husband, who you know, he's a little younger than me.

00:08:33.920 He grew up in a time where he just thought he was going to get married.

00:08:36.320 It wasn't a thing.

00:08:36.900 I'm a child of the 80s, it was gay marriage, whatever else, and I struggled with all that.

00:08:42.440 And we've done that on camera before, so I don't think we have to rehash that too much.

00:08:46.140 But I grew up in a time not thinking I would get married.

00:08:48.320 I never really thought of anything to the future, really.

00:08:50.600 And I kind of just put everything towards my career.

00:08:53.700 And now I've got David, who I'm FaceTiming with every night, whatever country,

00:08:57.980 and telling me he wants kids.

00:08:59.140 And I've got you on stage telling 10,000 people every night why they should have kids.

00:09:05.200 And finally, I thought, man, if I don't do this, there's really something wrong with me.

00:09:09.680 I'm with the person I'm supposed to be with.

00:09:11.760 I'm touring with someone that I think has offered more to the world in terms of how do we do this right

00:09:18.740 than anyone that I could possibly imagine.

00:09:20.640 And I get the privilege of being part of that.

00:09:22.340 If I can't do this, then this thing's really on me.

00:09:26.140 So we've got two two-year-olds now.

00:09:28.940 And Justin's middle name is Jordan, which one of the great joys of my life was calling you up that day

00:09:33.880 and asking you if we could do it.

00:09:35.320 And we got the Jordan Peterson tears, which we've gotten every now and again.

00:09:40.240 And so what that has done to me, I mean, the best example I can tell you is Luke was about two months old.

00:09:49.420 And one night, you know, coughing terribly, really nasal and just gunky.

00:09:55.340 Yeah, sick babies are so much fun.

00:09:58.100 But so, you know, a couple hours of trying to get him better and doing everything we could

00:10:02.200 and steam and calling the grandmothers and what do we do?

00:10:04.920 What do we do?

00:10:05.420 So, and finally, and calling the doctor.

00:10:07.200 And finally, we were like, we have to take him to the hospital.

00:10:10.120 And to be driving to that hospital, you know, with him in the car for the first time

00:10:14.420 since we had taken him home from the hospital when he was born and literally talking to God.

00:10:20.420 I mean, I don't know how often I do that.

00:10:22.000 Probably not that often.

00:10:23.340 And saying, take me.

00:10:24.880 Like, it was just the thing.

00:10:26.100 Take me.

00:10:26.700 Like, whatever's happening here, I could be done.

00:10:29.520 Like, let me be done.

00:10:30.720 And obviously, he's okay.

00:10:33.060 But that, that's the thing.

00:10:34.800 I think, in essence, that's the reason that you're saying to really do it right.

00:10:41.020 I mean, I've changed more in these two years.

00:10:43.420 I've matured more and dealt with more of my stuff, whatever else was left,

00:10:48.140 than it certainly at any point in my adult life.

00:10:52.240 And I'm just at the beginning of that.

00:10:53.940 You know, I'm also 48.

00:10:55.200 I have a lot of friends who have children that are mid-20s now.

00:10:59.280 So, think about that.

00:11:00.460 My contemporaries, you know, I'm hanging out with my friends from childhood.

00:11:03.880 Two of my best friends are still from five and eight years old.

00:11:07.900 They've got kids out of college now.

00:11:10.300 And I'm just bringing these children into the world.

00:11:12.260 And what that does to your perspective and change and everything else.

00:11:15.600 So, I would say the most powerful piece of it probably is there is something way more important than you.

00:11:24.240 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.

00:11:32.660 Like, their eyes are open, man.

00:11:34.440 And, like, they just, they think you are.

00:11:36.120 They like you, do they?

00:11:36.760 Yeah, and they think you are the best thing in the world.

00:11:40.400 And I think about it all the time.

00:11:41.560 I'm like, well, now it's on me to be the best thing that I can be.

00:11:44.920 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.

00:11:48.160 And I'm really trying to do it.

00:11:49.840 And actually, as I've tried to do it, it's becoming less difficult to do.

00:11:53.580 You know, like, eventually you start doing it right and then it kind of works.

00:11:56.960 I'm not saying it's perfect all the time.

00:11:57.840 Yeah, well, you become what you practice.

00:11:59.400 Yeah.

00:11:59.900 And then it's on you.

00:12:02.140 Yeah.

00:12:02.620 And aiming for that.

00:12:03.600 I didn't realize I was aiming for it, I think.

00:12:06.360 For what, do you think, now?

00:12:08.860 Well, you said.

00:12:09.840 Well, I don't think I realized I was aiming for something bigger than myself in some sense.

00:12:14.620 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.

00:12:24.680 I just thought, I'll just do this and it's working and it's good.

00:12:29.720 And that can really fill you up.

00:12:31.100 Yeah.

00:12:31.300 You know, you had this conversation on Bill Maher's podcast about that, that there are some people that maybe can do it.

00:12:37.720 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.

00:12:45.080 And even then, you get one dimensional, man.

00:12:47.180 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.

00:12:55.440 And I think, and I don't have 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.

00:13:03.320 I don't even mean that as a judgment call.

00:13:06.600 Well, you see, you made an observation about the sacrificial element telling that story about taking your son to the hospital, right?

00:13:13.900 So your fervent wish was if you could swap places and take on the trouble, you'd do that in a second.

00:13:26.000 Right.

00:13:26.340 So it wasn't even a, it wasn't even a choice.

00:13:28.320 Right.

00:13:28.560 Right.

00:13:28.860 It was just, that was it, obviously.

00:13:30.780 Right.

00:13:31.000 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.

00:13:37.060 And the reason for that is you're not mature until someone's more important than you.

00:13:40.980 And it has to be like that.

00:13:42.680 It's like, it's no, it's, there's no question.

00:13:45.040 Right.

00:13:45.560 It's no, there's no question.

00:13:46.580 And it's weird, eh?

00:13:47.740 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 all the negative emotion words clump together.

00:14:03.620 So there aren't, there's really one tree of negative emotion with the central trunk, right?

00:14:10.240 So the negative emotions are grief and disappointment, frustration and anxiety and pain.

00:14:15.640 Those are the big ones.

00:14:16.660 There's, maybe they branch off into more differentiated emotions.

00:14:22.760 One of the experiences that's integrally linked with negative emotion is self-consciousness.

00:14:31.500 Self-consciousness is so tightly associated with negative emotion that they're not statistically distinguishable.

00:14:37.480 There's no difference between being concerned with yourself and suffering.

00:14:40.840 And that's such an interesting, it's, it's such an unlikely reality that that's the case, you know, because the hedonistic story is that you can please yourself and that why shouldn't you please yourself?

00:14:55.140 Fill it up forever.

00:14:55.900 Well, the answer to that seems to be, well, first of all, who are you going to do that with?

00:15:01.500 Well, that's a real problem.

00:15:03.720 It's a real problem.

00:15:04.720 Unless you can please yourself and no one can, you know, we can, we can punish the worst criminals by putting them in solitary.

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00:16:11.340 That's how social human beings are.

00:16:13.240 And so, 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.

00:16:25.420 And so, that implies then that there's a non-obvious relationship between being focused on, now exactly what?

00:16:33.700 Focused on others? That's part of it.

00:16:35.620 Focused on something higher?

00:16:36.740 It's not, it's certainly not the narrow self, and it's certainly not the whims of the self.

00:16:42.360 No, it's building something that's well beyond you.

00:16:44.960 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, 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.

00:16:59.840 That is right. I know that that is right.

00:17:02.880 You think that's right? You know that's right.

00:17:03.640 I know that's right. Why do you know it?

00:17:04.920 Because it's not just that suddenly you have this magical moment of, I'm driving to the hospital, take me, right?

00:17:11.720 I just met this kid, right? He doesn't speak yet. I just met him, take me.

00:17:15.400 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.

00:17:23.820 I actually have to live longer and I have to, I play basketball every week with a bunch of guys who are also have kids that are, you know, in their twenties and thirties.

00:17:31.660 And then sometimes they bring their kids that are in twenties and thirties. So I'm talking about guys in their fifties and sixties and I'm starting to play with them.

00:17:37.520 And I was like, wait a minute, I want to be able to play with my sons when, when, you know, they're 18.

00:17:42.220 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.

00:17:47.320 So then I started eating right and getting better and working out more and all of these things.

00:17:52.200 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.

00:17:59.020 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.

00:18:07.080 So then you start building something that, well, my hands just went like that.

00:18:11.480 You start building something that goes up. And I think that that's real and tangible and we all innately know it.

00:18:17.920 And I've been speaking with Jonathan Pazio about these sorts of things quite a lot too.

00:18:22.260 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.

00:18:31.000 So I'm going to tell you a little bit about that because it's, once you understand it, you never forget it.

00:18:36.840 It's absolutely striking.

00:18:38.260 Okay. So in, so we talked about Jacob's ladder a little bit.

00:18:43.780 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.

00:18:55.420 Okay. So that's what the Abraham story is about.

00:18:57.500 So when, and, and there's a pact made, this is the covenant between Abraham and God.

00:19:05.520 So whatever's at that pinnacle of this ever ascending spiraling value structure and process, that's God.

00:19:15.360 Whatever's at the pinnacle and it recedes as you approach it.

00:19:18.500 So there's no, there's no final definition.

00:19:24.060 God is ineffable in that way.

00:19:25.620 Right. So there's a never ending spiral of up, just like there's a never ending spiral of down.

00:19:30.300 And so when Abraham, when the story opens, Abraham is a privileged infant, essentially.

00:19:39.540 He's 70 years old, but he's never really had to lift a finger because he's wealthy.

00:19:43.780 And so, so he has privilege in the modern language and God comes to him as the spirit of adventure.

00:19:51.220 And this is a definition of what's, of one of the facets of the highest plane of being, let's say.

00:19:56.820 And makes God, God makes Abraham a deal, which is the covenant.

00:20:01.420 And so the covenant is a contract.

00:20:03.700 And so one of the proclamations of the biblical text is that human beings exist in a contractual relationship with the divine.

00:20:11.940 Right. That's a very interesting claim.

00:20:14.860 And we exist in contractual relationships with each other.

00:20:17.820 That's what a marriage is, obviously, and all of our business arrangements and friendships,

00:20:21.940 although the details of the contract and the friendship are implicit, but they're still there.

00:20:26.080 It's an understanding.

00:20:27.340 So our essential mode of the being in the world is contractual.

00:20:31.120 And so God's contract with Abraham takes a very specific form.

00:20:35.020 He says to Abraham, it's very well defined.

00:20:38.540 He says to Abraham, if you leave your zone of comfort and you go out into the world and you put your heart into it,

00:20:47.120 this is what I can offer.

00:20:49.320 You'll be a blessing to yourself.

00:20:51.820 So that's a good deal, right?

00:20:53.120 Because part of the reason that people suffer is because they're wracked with self-doubt and guilt

00:20:58.700 and lack of faith in themselves, whether that's deserved or undeserved.

00:21:05.180 And sometimes it's undeserved and sometimes it's deserved.

00:21:07.920 But they're not a blessing to themselves.

00:21:09.960 They suffer more in consequence of their own being than for any other reason.

00:21:15.680 Okay.

00:21:15.820 So if you abide by the voice of adventure, then that disappears.

00:21:22.300 Okay.

00:21:22.740 So that's a good deal.

00:21:24.060 And then the next part of the deal is you'll do that in a manner that will bring you renown among other people

00:21:33.040 and it'll be justified.

00:21:34.900 So that's a good deal.

00:21:36.140 So that's basically reputation, right?

00:21:37.900 It's not fame.

00:21:38.880 It's reputation.

00:21:39.820 Those are different.

00:21:41.660 Fame.

00:21:43.100 You can attain fame by being disreputable.

00:21:46.200 Right.

00:21:46.840 And you can have a great reputation without being famous.

00:21:50.020 So they're not exactly the same.

00:21:51.980 Right.

00:21:52.340 And those are very, very different things.

00:21:54.160 They are.

00:21:54.960 And the reputation, it's also the case that the kingdom of heaven that Christ tells people to store treasure in

00:22:03.460 is a reputational storehouse.

00:22:05.860 So the gospel injunction basically is that the safest place to store value is in reputation.

00:22:11.940 And that makes perfect sense to me.

00:22:13.640 I think that's exactly right.

00:22:15.720 So, okay.

00:22:16.720 So the second part of the covenant is you'll make a name among other people and it'll be justified.

00:22:23.620 So that's a good deal.

00:22:25.540 And the third part is you'll establish something permanent, a dynasty.

00:22:35.260 Right.

00:22:35.820 So that's what makes Abraham the father of nations.

00:22:38.180 So now, now there's a new idea that enters into that.

00:22:41.340 So the idea is that 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.

00:22:57.060 And so that if you embody the father properly, you radically increase the probability of the paternal success of your children.

00:23:06.260 And I think that's true.

00:23:07.800 I think that's right.

00:23:08.860 So I was thinking about this in relationship to Dawkins' theory of the selfish gene.

00:23:14.000 It's like it's the implication of the selfish gene is that reproduction takes primacy and that there's no difference between reproduction and sex.

00:23:28.380 But that's not true.

00:23:30.420 There's a big difference between reproduction and sex, especially among human beings because we're high investment parents.

00:23:38.380 Right.

00:23:38.540 We don't just, it isn't just sex and the offspring runs off into the world.

00:23:42.940 It's a multi-generational investment.

00:23:45.380 Investment, that's why we live as long as we do, because it's a grandparental investment as well as a parental investment.

00:23:51.040 So imagine that to maximize the reproductive success of your offspring, you have to instantiate the pattern of the father.

00:23:58.940 And that's the divine pattern of the father.

00:24:01.420 Right.

00:24:01.600 And so, and God tells Abraham that you embody that pattern by pursuing the spirit of adventure.

00:24:07.880 So that's cool.

00:24:09.380 That's cool.

00:24:10.600 And then there's one last thing.

00:24:11.980 And he says, you'll do all three of those things in a way that'll be a benefit to everyone else.

00:24:16.560 And so then you think, so this is so, you think about this biologically even.

00:24:20.080 So you see this in your kids.

00:24:21.940 They have this impetus to master the world.

00:24:25.040 Right.

00:24:25.280 And now you want to watch that and you want to encourage that.

00:24:28.800 And you do that by establishing a relationship that's separate because I'm sure your boys are quite different.

00:24:34.980 Oh, yeah.

00:24:35.340 Yes, because children differ a lot from one another.

00:24:37.700 So you have to establish a different relationship with each of them.

00:24:40.900 But there's commonality in the relationship because it's an encouraging relationship if you're a good father.

00:24:46.460 So now, Matt, that you embody that encouraging relationship optimally.

00:24:51.740 Well, God's promise to Abraham is that's what makes you the father of nations, I think.

00:24:57.400 That's such a lovely equation because it makes the case that the same instinct that calls a child out into the world and that underlies the excitement of adventure is the same.

00:25:13.220 It's the same spirit that produces all four of those benefits.

00:25:18.260 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?

00:25:32.440 It's literally everything.

00:25:33.940 I mean, you're basically saying everything, right?

00:25:35.780 Like, if you do what you are supposed to do, you will order the world.

00:25:41.840 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.

00:25:57.120 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.

00:26:05.260 You did press all day long.

00:26:06.980 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.

00:26:14.240 And we end up in the alley after because you don't walk out the front, you know, to where everybody's going to mob you.

00:26:19.300 And it was about 1 a.m. and we walk out and it's a dark alley and we had no security.

00:26:23.900 It was just me, you, Tammy, and John, the tour manager.

00:26:27.500 And there were two guys about 40 yards away from us and we could sort of see them and it almost seemed like they were fighting or something.

00:26:34.160 They started kind of rushing towards us and we all thought for a second that they were, you know, going to jump us or something.

00:26:40.380 And then as they got closer, we saw they were both in tears.

00:26:42.820 One guy was probably about late 50s and one guy was probably early 20s.

00:26:46.900 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, went to the show alone, saw each other there and made amends.

00:27:02.360 I mean, I just got chills up my spine telling you the story again.

00:27:04.940 Like, what's the point of that?

00:27:06.860 The point is that if you order yourself, that you will order the world.

00:27:11.460 That's real.

00:27:12.000 There's a line that I've been reading from Carl Jung, who I know had a little influence on you over the years, that I've been ending a lot of my shows with lately.

00:27:18.900 I'm going to slightly butcher the exact quote.

00:27:20.920 But in essence, that if you don't 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.

00:27:30.080 Life will, the walls will basically close in on you.

00:27:33.780 And we all know this.

00:27:35.640 Who, think of all the interesting clues.

00:27:37.900 Yeah, that's all that's left is the suffering, the pointless suffering.

00:27:41.180 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.

00:27:46.200 Eight years ago, this month, actually.

00:27:47.560 Right, right.

00:27:48.040 You said it's been eight years.

00:27:49.280 It's been eight.

00:27:49.740 I think it was eight years ago this week.

00:27:51.240 It was November.

00:27:52.280 It was the second week of November in 2016.

00:27:55.200 I had just moved into a new house.

00:27:56.940 We were building my home studio in the garage.

00:27:59.000 I didn't even have internet.

00:28:00.180 I was stealing internet from my neighbor.

00:28:02.940 We did this.

00:28:03.780 You were just on the scene because of the free speech bill.

00:28:06.660 It was like a month, a month.

00:28:08.100 And suddenly my Twitter feed was blowing up.

00:28:10.160 You got to talk to this guy, Jordan Peterson.

00:28:11.980 We jump on a Skype.

00:28:13.180 That's right.

00:28:13.600 People can find this online.

00:28:14.960 We jump on the Skype.

00:28:15.640 It's very, you know, sketchy in and out.

00:28:18.240 The picture's no good.

00:28:19.200 It's all pixelated.

00:28:20.520 And you're in your office and I'm sitting in my house and we're talking.

00:28:24.600 You're doing the Peter Pan story and everything.

00:28:26.480 And it ends and I turned to David.

00:28:29.920 I swear on my life.

00:28:31.120 And I said to him, that guy is either the most brilliant person I've ever talked to or completely insane.

00:28:37.240 I leave it to you to decide.

00:28:39.240 Yeah, yeah.

00:28:39.460 I guess I leave it to the people.

00:28:40.520 There's still plenty of discussion about that.

00:28:42.000 Right.

00:28:42.520 Exactly.

00:28:43.040 But flash forward eight years, we've both been on adventures that have kind of collided at times and then gone separately at times.

00:28:51.440 Good, bad, all sort of health things, all the kids, all the stuff.

00:28:56.400 And yet I think that we're probably both sitting here as good as we've ever been.

00:29:02.140 That's a sort of scary.

00:29:03.220 I don't like saying it in some sense because then it feels like it's inviting doom or something.

00:29:07.940 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 of years.

00:29:19.600 It's like, I think we had a little something to do with getting people to wake up to what was going on in the world.

00:29:26.300 You know, you did it at the sort of psychological personal front.

00:29:29.180 I kind of did it on the political front.

00:29:31.160 And we have an unbelievably hopeful world coming right now, I think.

00:29:35.760 Mm-hmm.

00:29:36.700 Mm-hmm.

00:29:37.280 So in the Cain and Abel story, Cain makes second-rate sacrifices, right?

00:29:45.060 So he doesn't bring his best to the table.

00:29:46.900 And in consequence, he fails.

00:29:50.860 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.

00:30:05.220 So they're acting it out.

00:30:06.340 And so human beings discovered 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.

00:30:23.020 So that's why the community is based on sacrifice.

00:30:26.460 And you 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 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.

00:30:42.900 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.

00:30:53.960 And so he could notice that and rectify his fault and confess and atone and fly right and succeed.

00:31:05.040 That's on the table, but instead he becomes bitter and he shakes his fist at God.

00:31:11.060 And so his presumption fundamentally is that the fact of his failure is emblematic of the dysfunction of the world.

00:31:20.980 It's not him, even though he's not bringing his best to the table.

00:31:25.020 It's the structure of reality itself.

00:31:27.260 So it's unbelievably arrogant, right?

00:31:29.340 So that's the Luciferian element.

00:31:31.220 Unbelievably intellectually arrogant.

00:31:33.020 What wouldn't you do to the world if you believe that?

00:31:37.600 What wouldn't you do?

00:31:39.280 Yeah, you'd burn it to the ground.

00:31:40.980 Well, and that's basically what happens in the story as it unfolds.

00:31:44.920 So he goes, he shakes his fist at God and then he has a conversation with him, with God.

00:31:51.820 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.

00:32:02.420 First of all, if you did well, you would be accepted.

00:32:06.420 So that's a very interesting claim.

00:32:08.380 The idea is that if you gave it everything you had, it would work.

00:32:13.600 And you can imagine that that's a kind of faith, right?

00:32:16.140 That you have to have faith to do that.

00:32:17.700 Because there's no evidence to begin with that if you brought your best to the table, it would work.

00:32:24.040 And, you know, maybe you've had experiences where people betrayed you and so forth that made you doubtful or you betrayed yourself.

00:32:30.440 So it is emblematic of faith to bring your best to the table.

00:32:34.600 So God's rejoinder to Cain is that if you brought your best to the table, you would succeed.

00:32:41.400 Now, you can imagine people being skeptical about that.

00:32:45.140 But I think the right response to the skeptics is, have you brought your best to the table?

00:32:50.540 What's the other option?

00:32:52.460 Well, that's what's explored.

00:32:55.480 Right.

00:32:55.600 So, and then God says something even stranger to Cain.

00:32:59.200 He says something like, you're also blaming your suffering on your failure, but that's not exactly right.

00:33:07.360 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.

00:33:18.240 And there's an intervening variable theory in this account between Cain and Abel.

00:33:24.020 So what God tells Cain is that there were many ways that he could have reacted to the fact of his own failure.

00:33:30.260 And he picked one.

00:33:31.460 And the one he picked was rife with a terrible temptation.

00:33:36.640 He says, sin crouches at your door like a sexually aroused predatory animal, and you let it in to have its way with you.

00:33:43.980 And so the idea there is that Cain is turning to...

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00:34:34.720 Vengeful bitterness in consequence of his failure when that wasn't the only option.

00:34:44.500 So he's inviting the spirit of vengeful bitterness to possess him, and then he's actually to have its way with him.

00:34:52.540 And he's actually entering into a creative union with that, and that that's the cause of his misery.

00:34:58.600 And that's the end of the discussion, and that enrages Cain, and that's when he invites Abel to go work with him.

00:35:06.620 So it's a false invitation.

00:35:10.460 Then he kills him.

00:35:11.960 And then Cain's children become more and more murderous, and his grandchildren make weapons of war.

00:35:19.340 And the next story is the flood or the Tower of Babel, right?

00:35:22.740 So it's a complete story of human degeneration, 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.

00:35:38.000 And you think, well, what's the counterproposition to that?

00:35:40.560 Is that the counterproposition is that you can succeed by hedging your bets.

00:35:46.260 Well, who would believe that?

00:35:48.640 Like, when you lay it out rightly like that.

00:35:50.440 You might just get away with it, something like that.

00:35:52.280 Well, that's the hope.

00:35:54.320 But then underneath that, there's obviously the idea that you're smart enough to pull the wool over what?

00:35:59.200 Your eyes?

00:36:00.040 God's eyes.

00:36:00.920 God's eyes.

00:36:01.620 Everyone's eyes?

00:36:02.560 That's who you are.

00:36:03.700 Or worse, that's the spirit that you've invited to possess you.

00:36:08.080 Right.

00:36:08.440 And then when it reveals itself completely, it turns out to be fratricidal and then genocide.

00:36:13.540 That's probably how most of us operate on a day-to-day basis, right?

00:36:16.600 I mean, most people probably operate on some version of pulling the wool over their eyes,

00:36:22.560 right?

00:36:23.340 Yeah.

00:36:23.700 Well, that's certainly...

00:36:25.160 I'm not talking about the most exceptional people.

00:36:28.100 You know, I'm not talking about like that level.

00:36:29.600 That's the question of conscience for everyone.

00:36:31.740 Yeah.

00:36:31.940 You know, it's like, well, if things aren't going your way, just whose fault is that?

00:36:39.220 Well, the other thing you might want to realize too is that if you're lucky, it's your fault

00:36:43.520 because you could do something about that.

00:36:46.080 If it's the state of the world, let's say, or if it's God's distaste for you at some fundamental

00:36:53.320 level, let's say, or the impossibility of existence in general, then you're really in hell.

00:37:00.400 But if it's you, well, then you could possibly do something about it if you were willing to.

00:37:06.780 You might want to maybe clean your room, perhaps.

00:37:08.020 Well, maybe.

00:37:08.220 Wouldn't that be something to do?

00:37:09.360 Maybe.

00:37:09.740 Well, you could start by straightening out what you can straighten out.

00:37:12.600 Well, and you said, you know, you saw on the tour repeatedly the fact that that worked

00:37:19.140 for so many people.

00:37:20.960 And so, you know, and that's part of the reason why we've kept this going.

00:37:24.460 Well, it's the reason that we've kept it going.

00:37:27.800 You know, it's extremely interesting and it's great to have the opportunity to think on my

00:37:32.900 feet.

00:37:33.440 And, but.

00:37:33.900 Well, it's your adventure.

00:37:35.220 Yeah, right.

00:37:35.720 It's your adventure.

00:37:36.580 I saw it then.

00:37:37.820 And I know, even though we're not on tour together right now, I know you're still doing

00:37:41.260 it.

00:37:41.400 You know, I had forgotten that you were, I wonder if you were the first relatively large

00:37:52.100 podcaster to talk to me after everything blew up in Canada.

00:37:56.560 It might've been, you know, because.

00:37:58.000 Yeah.

00:37:58.260 Like I made those videos on Bill C-16 in about mid-October in 2016.

00:38:05.800 And so it, it was, and what was happening in your career at that point, like you were

00:38:12.160 established on YouTube already as a commentator.

00:38:14.620 Now at that point.

00:38:15.440 I had left the left, so to speak.

00:38:17.700 You know, I was still fighting for the same liberal values that I actually still believe

00:38:21.860 in.

00:38:21.980 I just can't use the word liberal anymore for, we can get into that if you want.

00:38:25.820 It's just, it just becomes impossible linguistically to explain why liberal values are no longer associated

00:38:31.560 with the liberals, which we both obviously talked a lot about, but I was going, I was

00:38:35.380 really independent for the first time at that point.

00:38:38.320 I had just bought my first house.

00:38:39.860 We were doing the home studio thing.

00:38:41.960 Really nobody had done that.

00:38:43.860 You know, I really, I really was at the front end of building a TV ready studio.

00:38:48.420 I mean, you came to that house many times and we did a lot of, a lot of great shows there.

00:38:52.300 And I was building something that could have just as easily been replicated in Fox or CNN

00:38:57.080 or elsewhere.

00:38:57.520 We turned a bedroom into a control room.

00:38:59.860 We, we had a proper lighting grid.

00:39:01.480 We did it.

00:39:01.940 We did it.

00:39:02.380 All the right equipment, right staff, et cetera.

00:39:04.600 Yeah.

00:39:04.820 Right.

00:39:05.260 But the main thing that I was still harping on politically was free speech because I saw

00:39:11.080 the hysteria of the left.

00:39:12.780 And then I started looking at Twitter and Twitter obviously was very different at the time, but

00:39:16.880 you know what it was like.

00:39:17.700 You'd tweet something and then you'd look at the mentions and suddenly everybody's going

00:39:21.800 on and on about this guy, Jordan Peterson.

00:39:24.060 I thought, well, let's talk to this guy, Jordan Peterson.

00:39:27.440 And my studio is not ready and he's up in Canada.

00:39:29.680 So we'll jump on Skype and do it.

00:39:31.460 I think it might've actually been my first Skype interview ever, you know, and then during

00:39:35.660 COVID that obviously became kind of ubiquitous.

00:39:38.520 But from that point, I think I, I just went in on the free speech thing.

00:39:47.100 It, it, it was, well, I knew it was right, but it also felt, it, it felt deeply important.

00:39:53.000 And now.

00:39:53.320 Why did you did, why did you decide to come on tour with me?

00:39:56.020 Cause that was pretty soon afterwards, right?

00:39:57.760 You may not remember how it happened, but it almost, I, it almost was a joke.

00:40:01.540 And this says a lot, this says a lot about you actually.

00:40:04.000 You, you, me and Ben Shapiro did a show at my house.

00:40:07.040 Yeah.

00:40:07.300 In January, I believe, uh, it was, it was two eight.

00:40:10.380 Yeah.

00:40:10.660 Yeah.

00:40:11.180 It was January, 2018.

00:40:12.760 The three of us did the show and, uh, you were doing your first theater show that night

00:40:17.900 at the Orpheum in LA.

00:40:19.460 Okay.

00:40:19.820 And we did, we did like a three hour show, the three of us.

00:40:23.740 And I kept, I knew you and Ben could just do this all day long.

00:40:27.120 I barely had to be there.

00:40:28.060 I just had to, you know, kind of look one way every now and again.

00:40:30.480 Um, but I knew you had this big theater show.

00:40:33.740 So I wanted to end it a little bit early.

00:40:35.320 We ended up going about three hours.

00:40:36.620 And then as we were saying goodbye and we had only met in person, I don't know, three

00:40:40.900 times, maybe, maybe, maybe that was the second time we met.

00:40:43.580 I'm not even sure.

00:40:44.680 I said to you, and I was kind of joking as you were standing on the stoop of my house,

00:40:48.940 leaving to go to the theater.

00:40:50.600 I said to you, Hey Jordan, do you want me to come tonight?

00:40:53.220 And I'll crack a couple of jokes about lobsters and some of the other funny references.

00:40:56.960 And you said, yeah, that would be a great idea.

00:40:58.920 And then I came.

00:40:59.800 The Orpheum was sold out.

00:41:01.520 It was the most people I had ever, you know, I'd been doing standup for years, but I had

00:41:04.540 never done a 5,000 seat theater.

00:41:06.720 And I guess I crushed it.

00:41:09.520 And the whole CAA team was right there.

00:41:11.680 And I remember the two agents came right up to me.

00:41:14.040 They said, this, this show was amazing.

00:41:15.800 We're going to take this on tour.

00:41:17.040 You want, you want to open for them?

00:41:18.440 I said, well, we should probably ask Jordan.

00:41:19.720 And then you immediately said yes.

00:41:21.360 And then it completely changed my life.

00:41:23.040 I look back on it like it was a dream.

00:41:25.440 Sometimes I really think back, I'm like, did we really do that thing?

00:41:29.160 It was incredible.

00:41:30.660 Well, even that renting that damn theater, you know, so.

00:41:33.760 Because you had no idea.

00:41:34.940 And do you remember, do you remember one of the things that I would always say at the top of the show?

00:41:38.640 And I tried to switch it up as much as possible.

00:41:40.660 Definitely not as much as you.

00:41:41.620 Because I felt my job was to be funny so that, so that people would come and feel relaxed for the first 10 or 15 minutes.

00:41:49.200 Then Jordan could do his thing.

00:41:50.540 And then I would try to be silly with you for the most part at the end.

00:41:52.880 That way it felt like a complete show.

00:41:54.340 That was, that was what I always felt.

00:41:55.840 Because otherwise people were coming for hardcore stuff.

00:41:59.180 I mean, unbelievably impactful stuff.

00:42:01.100 And I didn't want them leaving with that.

00:42:02.860 I wanted them to walk out of there like, wow, we had a great time.

00:42:04.860 And then tell their friends.

00:42:05.740 So I always felt that that was my job.

00:42:08.780 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.

00:42:18.240 And I love that.

00:42:19.160 That actually, that's the Jacob Blatter story right there, right?

00:42:22.660 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.

00:42:30.720 You helped order them.

00:42:32.380 They were getting dressed, right?

00:42:33.920 All these guys coming up in suits.

00:42:35.480 We were in Sweden and I stopped at an H&M in Sweden because I wanted a new suit for that show.

00:42:40.520 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.

00:42:49.160 And I tapped him on the shoulder.

00:42:49.960 I said, I am too.

00:42:50.660 And then we called him out on the show that night.

00:42:52.540 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.

00:42:58.040 They now have kids.

00:42:58.800 You're talking to people who five years ago were a complete disaster.

00:43:01.920 That's literally the story you're telling me right now.

00:43:05.460 It's incredible.

00:43:06.520 So in the Abrahamic story, so you have the story of Cain and Abel and it describes the way that the psyche and then society deteriorates, right?

00:43:18.700 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?

00:43:31.920 And then you have the flood, which is the degeneration in the direction of chaos.

00:43:38.600 Then you have the Tower of Babel, which is degeneration into totalitarianism, right?

00:43:43.560 So it's pathology of chaos.

00:43:46.200 It's like degeneration of the individual in society, pathology of chaos, pathology of order.

00:43:51.500 Then you have the story of Abraham, which is the antidote to that.

00:43:55.480 So it's like Abraham is the new Abel.

00:43:59.840 So he decides that he's going to forego his comfort and follow the spirit of adventure.

00:44:07.700 One of the claims that I've been making in this book, but also on the last tour, was that the divine is characterized in the Old and New Testaments also as the truth that will set you free.

00:44:22.140 And so adventure is part of that, and truth is part of that, and they're reflective of the same unified thing.

00:44:29.660 And I think the reason for that is that there is no better adventure than the truth.

00:44:35.300 And the reason for that, it touches on things we've already discussed, but I think there's a technical reason for that.

00:44:41.520 It's like, if you want something from someone, you can craft your words to get that thing you want.

00:44:50.060 And maybe you'll get it, maybe you won't.

00:44:52.880 And you might say that you succeed when you get it.

00:44:56.140 But the problem with that hypothesis is, how do you know that you wanted the right thing?

00:45:02.000 That's a really big problem, because lots of times we chase the wrong thing.

00:45:05.860 Well, there's an alternative approach, which is, you say what you believe to be the case,

00:45:11.880 and you make the presumption, that's faith, let's say.

00:45:15.960 You make the presumption that whatever happens as a consequence of that is the best thing that could happen.

00:45:22.040 So, but also, this is the adventurous part, you don't know what's going to happen, right?

00:45:28.240 And so you're throwing yourself into the fray.

00:45:31.400 I'm going to say what I think, and there'll be consequences, but I don't know what they are.

00:45:37.560 Well, you think, well, that's scary.

00:45:39.360 It's like, well, yeah, but it's extremely interesting.

00:45:45.460 It's ridiculously exciting.

00:45:46.960 Well, relative to what's happening in the world right now, just the results of this election,

00:45:50.660 and the fact that a bunch of us, the laundry list of people, whether it was you and I, or Rogan,

00:45:56.720 or Brett Weinstein, or Douglas Murray, or just all of these people that just started talking,

00:46:01.600 that's all we were doing.

00:46:02.960 When that whole intellectual dark web thing happened, all it was was that we were talking.

00:46:07.120 There was magic to it in that people were hearing things from you that maybe they hadn't heard before,

00:46:11.720 or they should have heard before, or their parents didn't tell them, or something like that,

00:46:14.860 or education didn't give them, or they were hearing a biological explanation about evolution from Brett

00:46:19.840 that they hadn't heard before, or something like that.

00:46:21.880 But really, what was happening, we were having honest discussions and disagreements and agreements

00:46:27.320 about a whole host of things, and there was no other outlet for that.

00:46:31.480 There was also no other agenda than that.

00:46:33.400 And there was no agenda, and that's the thing.

00:46:34.920 And in some ways, that's why we couldn't all turn it into something.

00:46:37.960 You know, there was this moment where everyone was like, oh my God, are you guys a TV network?

00:46:40.880 Are you a road show?

00:46:42.320 Are you a podcast?

00:46:43.680 Like, what is this thing?

00:46:45.420 Is it everyone on tour together?

00:46:47.660 Whatever.

00:46:47.940 And we couldn't quite figure it out, because I think partly because we were just doing it for the sake of doing it.

00:46:54.280 I was doing what I thought was best in my life, and I think it's borne out that way.

00:47:00.020 I think you did as well.

00:47:02.120 But look what happened to the world since then.

00:47:04.480 We were very early adopters of a very powerful technology.

00:47:08.120 So that was a big part of it.

00:47:08.700 Right, so there were two things.

00:47:09.900 Right, so there are two parts, right?

00:47:11.440 So the first part is just that we were talking, right?

00:47:14.140 And nobody else was having mature conversations anywhere, anywhere.

00:47:17.240 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.

00:47:24.740 I thought, this thing's making everybody dumber.

00:47:26.480 I'm not even sure that Snapchat really exists anymore.

00:47:28.460 But it was, you know, 10-second, and there were Vine.

00:47:30.520 Do you remember Vine videos?

00:47:32.120 It was a portion of Twitter, these six-second looped videos.

00:47:34.820 And I thought, this is insane.

00:47:37.060 There's so many things to talk about.

00:47:38.600 There's so much going on in the world.

00:47:40.360 Why are we just dumbing everything and clipping everything down like this?

00:47:43.340 I had become friends with Larry King, and I thought, that's what I want to do.

00:47:47.940 I want to sit with somebody and hear what they have to say.

00:47:52.040 And then, now, subsequently in the last eight years, everybody and their brother has a podcast, and everyone's doing it.

00:47:57.340 But I think we were early in on that.

00:47:58.880 And then you're right.

00:47:59.640 We were early in.

00:48:01.460 There were people in before us, for sure.

00:48:03.060 But we were early in on leveraging what technology was going to do.

00:48:07.360 Rogan.

00:48:08.260 Rogan got in around the same time I did.

00:48:10.760 I mean, the network that I worked for, the Young Turks, I don't have a lot of good things to say about them.

00:48:15.480 But Cenk Uygur did realize that online was going to matter more than mainstream.

00:48:21.240 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.

00:48:31.880 This was basically the election on reality and how many people are still going to swallow the lies.

00:48:37.660 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.

00:48:45.220 I mean, we can do the whole thing.

00:48:46.300 And so that was one portion of people and the rest of us that where it's messy.

00:48:52.400 And maybe RFK is right about some things, maybe not.

00:48:55.620 But what's bringing Tulsi over?

00:48:57.160 And we did that Rescue the Republic event.

00:48:58.780 And it was like, what was bringing Russell Brand and you and me and RFK and Tulsi and Brett, all of these people who—

00:49:06.380 Strange, strange bedfellows.

00:49:07.300 None of this would make any sense in an ordered world.

00:49:10.340 But the world had gotten so out of control that suddenly it pushed us together.

00:49:13.700 I think that's actually exactly what you just laid out in the story right there, right?

00:49:17.220 It went so haywire that suddenly we all got pushed together.

00:49:20.840 And so I guess my question to you then would be, are we now on the other side?

00:49:26.520 Doesn't it feel like something has fundamentally shifted?

00:49:30.820 Well, I think what really what put the capstone on was the last month of this presidential election.

00:49:40.100 I think what happened was that Barron Trump got the ear of Trump and knew the podcast world.

00:49:50.840 And Trump, being very entrepreneurial and a risk taker, decided to pay attention.

00:49:57.700 Yeah.

00:49:58.220 Because he picked a lot of podcasts that you'd only pick if you knew the podcast world.

00:50:04.580 I think Rogan's an obvious choice because he's the 800-pound gorilla, obviously.

00:50:09.500 Although I'm not saying it wasn't courageous and wise of Trump to go on Rogan.

00:50:14.740 No, basically no other politician would ever do a three-hour unedited, you know, sitcom like that.

00:50:20.240 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 Rogan is a fringe figure and certainly like some kind of gateway to the right is ignorant and preposterous.

00:50:42.800 Both of those things.

00:50:43.820 Yet bizarrely true now also, right?

00:50:46.480 But, right, like that's-

00:50:47.600 Well, yeah, but the thing is-

00:50:48.800 It shouldn't be, it shouldn't be.

00:50:50.220 He's a gateway to, it's a very strange version of the right.

00:50:54.680 Well, that's what they used to say about me.

00:50:56.140 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.

00:51:06.420 So then suddenly I'm talking to you, and then I was like, 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.

00:51:15.700 So then that's what people used to say to me all the time, you're the gateway drug.

00:51:19.780 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?

00:51:27.720 Well, you idiots, you had him.

00:51:29.260 Yeah, no.

00:51:29.720 You had him, you refused to talk to him, and you tried to get him kicked off, you tried to get him kicked off Spotify.

00:51:35.540 Did you see Hurwitz made public, Greg Hurwitz made public this week?

00:51:39.280 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.

00:51:49.120 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.

00:51:59.720 It's not because you're not being invited.

00:52:01.660 And I invited dozens of high-ranking Democrats to come on my podcast, and all of them said no.

00:52:10.360 They would talk to me privately, but not publicly.

00:52:13.240 As recently as I believe it was last March, when we were having the big bipartisan border deal fight, remember that?

00:52:19.560 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.

00:52:24.080 It's obviously the president is allowed to deal with the border.

00:52:26.200 We went to D.C.

00:52:28.080 We hunkered down in a studio for a day in Rumble Studios.

00:52:31.320 We invited 20 Republicans and 20 Democrats.

00:52:34.440 19 Republicans said yes.

00:52:36.460 The only one who couldn't do it that day was Rand Paul because one of his staffers got stabbed on the street of D.C.

00:52:42.160 That tells you everything you need to know about that.

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00:54:00.040 19 of 20 Democrats did not respond.

00:54:03.600 The only one who responded was Ilhan Omar, which was kind of hilarious.

00:54:06.720 And she said no.

00:54:07.960 But that tells you it right there.

00:54:09.700 I am not thought of as a gotcha interviewer, right?

00:54:14.600 Like, the biggest knock on me for years is, oh, Ruben's just going to throw you softballs.

00:54:18.900 I was just interested in talking to people.

00:54:21.440 But the idea that no-

00:54:21.980 Oh, that's Rogan, too.

00:54:23.420 Rogan's probably a little harsher than you, but he's not a gotcha interviewer ever.

00:54:28.040 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.

00:54:40.000 I think what's now happened is they cannot ignore it anymore.

00:54:43.140 That is exactly what happened in this last month.

00:54:44.460 If I was getting the views or you were getting the views that MSNBC were getting, I would consider a new career.

00:54:49.620 I actually mean that at this point.

00:54:51.080 We're blowing them out of the water.

00:54:52.760 And I'm not telling you it's because I'm the best journalist in the world.

00:54:56.100 I don't even consider myself a journalist.

00:54:57.640 I tell people what I think.

00:54:58.920 I see the news in the morning 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.

00:55:09.400 I don't just try to say, oh, there's 10 things going on.

00:55:12.040 I try to loop it into some sort of narrative story.

00:55:14.800 And you've met my producer, Phoenix, who you hugely helped in his own life.

00:55:19.420 And then we started working together.

00:55:21.360 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.

00:55:26.920 And I'm very aware of that.

00:55:28.660 I'm very aware of that.

00:55:29.640 And I don't expect everyone to do it.

00:55:31.120 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.

00:55:34.680 But I want you to walk away with, oh, there's some context to what's going on here.

00:55:38.560 Not just, okay, this guy said this and this one did this and just endless.

00:55:43.660 Because otherwise we'll do that forever, right?

00:55:45.080 We'll just do it forever.

00:55:46.140 And I think by all of us having these conversations, by starting to find these alliances, by the left being so hysterical.

00:55:52.100 And you may remember we were in Miami a couple years ago at a party in a backyard.

00:55:59.860 And there was a big debate about what do we do?

00:56:01.980 It was a lot of your friends, a lot of our friends.

00:56:04.960 And there was a big debate about what do we do with the Democrats.

00:56:07.260 And I kept saying they are not coming around.

00:56:10.240 They are not coming around.

00:56:11.740 And Greg was taking the counter position.

00:56:13.960 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.

00:56:18.200 I think maybe now, you know, we're, no, right.

00:56:21.840 So it's going to be, it's going to be years now because they still have an opportunity now.

00:56:26.060 But there's an opportunity at least.

00:56:27.280 He was going to take the destruction.

00:56:28.900 And I think we have the destruction now.

00:56:30.580 I don't know how haywire it goes on their side, but I think that was it.

00:56:34.220 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.

00:56:41.360 That's it.

00:56:42.220 Willing to talk and willing to question things.

00:56:44.000 And then it got put on steroids with COVID.

00:56:45.580 It's so funny watching the MSNBC people do a postmortem on, what's their claim?

00:56:55.840 The right stranglehold on the new media.

00:56:59.640 It's like, well, you can't really call it a stranglehold when the reason it exists is because you wouldn't participate.

00:57:08.180 Right.

00:57:08.420 And so you just, you, 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, with people.

00:57:26.420 It certainly wasn't inevitable that Rogan was going to transform into a Trump supporter.

00:57:32.220 No, they have themselves to blame.

00:57:33.900 Yeah, definitely.

00:57:34.320 They have absolutely themselves to blame.

00:57:35.980 Look, when I, when I got my off, when I got the offer for my first book and we were on tour, we were in, maybe we were in Copenhagen, I think.

00:57:44.820 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.

00:57:50.540 And the way you smiled and slapped your hands and you were sitting in a, you were sitting in a rotating chair and I remember your chair fully spun around.

00:57:57.080 You were so happy for me.

00:57:58.340 That book, Don't Burn This Book, became a New York Times bestseller.

00:58:02.000 It should have been like number two or three, but, you know, they fiddle with the numbers.

00:58:04.960 I don't even care about that.

00:58:06.320 I mentioned that only because I could not get on MSNBC, CNN, or any mainstream media.

00:58:12.400 Fox put me on constantly.

00:58:14.300 So again, it's like.

00:58:15.420 It's the same with, with 12 rules.

00:58:16.820 Like that was, I think that's the biggest selling nonfiction book in Canadian history.

00:58:24.200 I think.

00:58:24.940 Yeah.

00:58:25.420 It's, it's certainly close.

00:58:26.920 And.

00:58:27.120 Oh, they said, right.

00:58:27.880 They said you weren't publishing.

00:58:29.040 Well, that's the first thing.

00:58:29.980 The New York Times never did put it on the list.

00:58:32.440 Right.

00:58:32.740 Never.

00:58:33.440 And so that was pretty interesting.

00:58:34.900 And then I had no mainstream media interviews about 12 rules in the United States, like zero.

00:58:45.360 Fox.

00:58:46.280 Fox.

00:58:46.820 Yes.

00:58:47.240 Right.

00:58:47.520 But then think about what happens.

00:58:48.940 So then you do that unbelievable interview with Kathy Newman, right?

00:58:52.780 And, and then suddenly this thing happens online.

00:58:56.120 I mean, that was that Kathy Newman moment.

00:58:58.580 That was an unbelievably like tear the internet in half moment for people that were paying attention.

00:59:04.220 So now this huge well of support is well, it's support.

00:59:08.740 It's love and it's hate and it's anger and it's confusion.

00:59:10.620 All the emotions that anyone could have about any of this that's happening online and it's being completely ignored on the mainstream.

00:59:16.000 So now people.

00:59:17.240 Well, it's not enough so that Channel 4, which was the interview, actually posted the whole interview online without even, I think, a moment's consideration.

00:59:26.660 That just stunned me that they did that.

00:59:28.700 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.

00:59:37.760 It was no big deal or whatever.

00:59:38.920 And then once, and then once she realized how sort of bad she looked, then, then of course she wanted to play the victim and everything else.

00:59:46.700 But the point of the point that I'm trying to show there is that there has been something going on online 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.

00:59:59.040 That was being completely ignored by the mainstream.

01:00:02.880 And that's why when you say, well, what's going on at MSNBC and they can't do a proper postmortem and there's now they're saying the Latinos are white supremacists.

01:00:09.660 Or the gays are white supremacists.

01:00:11.760 It's like, because you guys ignored, you lied about everything and ignored all of us the entire time.

01:00:18.060 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.

01:00:26.920 We would probably have Kamala Harris as the president-elect.

01:00:30.120 Because most people are willing to swallow a lot of shit.

01:00:34.280 You know what I mean?

01:00:35.100 Like we all have our own problems, all of our own stuff.

01:00:37.120 But they went so in on all of the lies.

01:00:40.340 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.

01:00:50.300 The fact that he ran with that hoax again after it has been debunked.

01:00:55.400 By people who wouldn't debunk it unless it was seriously not true.

01:00:59.840 I think the first time that got to mainstream media was me on real time because James Carville brought it up with Marr.

01:01:06.100 And I had never heard it said on mainstream and I wasn't going to let him get away with it.

01:01:09.220 And I said, what are you talking about?

01:01:10.100 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.

01:01:16.100 But Carville literally crumbles to the table because he did not know what to do when confronted with reality.

01:01:21.540 And then Bill, Bill said, well, it was worded inarticulately or something to that effect.

01:01:26.380 And I thought, well, that's an interesting way of playing a little bit of cleanup on that.

01:01:30.360 But the point is, they thought, I think Obama, well, what would your psychological analysis of Obama be right there?

01:01:37.940 It's two days before the election.

01:01:39.620 He either believes it, which there's no way he could be that dumb and ignorant.

01:01:44.060 Simply impossible.

01:01:45.180 But maybe you want to give him 5% chance.

01:01:47.300 You want to give him 5%?

01:01:48.180 What do you want to give him on that?

01:01:49.960 Let's give him 20%, right?

01:01:51.280 Okay, great, 20%.

01:01:53.060 So he's unbelievably dumb and ignorant.

01:01:55.200 And he ran the speech by nobody who's willing to confront him with reality.

01:01:59.160 Or what would the only alternative be?

01:02:01.320 He knows he can lie.

01:02:02.800 It doesn't matter how big the lie is.

01:02:04.740 And he thinks the lie will accomplish the goal, that the ends justify the means.

01:02:08.500 I think they got to the end of that road.

01:02:10.480 I think that's what this election was.

01:02:12.120 It will not work anymore.

01:02:13.840 You cannot tell us that vaccines work when they don't.

01:02:17.000 You cannot tell us that there are very fine people on both sides.

01:02:19.720 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.

01:02:26.280 I mean, we could do a million versions.

01:02:27.760 That six-foot social distancing was scientifically backed.

01:02:30.420 And I think that's actually what this election was about.

01:02:33.000 It really—Trump then became the avatar that was sort of wrapped around that thing.

01:02:37.400 And then she became—Kamala basically became the avatar for the machine.

01:02:40.820 And we talked, too, about the fact that in the last month, a lot of radical things happened around Trump the last month.

01:02:46.860 Oh, yeah.

01:02:47.320 I mean, the fact that this weird coalition gathered around him, which is, you know, completely preposterous.

01:02:53.680 It's completely preposterous.

01:02:55.540 Elon Musk is now going to be running the Department of Governmental Efficiency, and that has the same acronym as DOGE.

01:03:03.540 That was a coin, and it's a funny dog, and it's do-only-good every day.

01:03:07.640 It's like, what the hell is going on here?

01:03:10.040 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.

01:03:18.660 And that Gabbard is on board, and that Robert F. Kennedy came along, and that Vance is along, and so is Vivek Ramaswamy.

01:03:26.740 I mean, these are very unlikely Republicans, very unlikely, and so that's weird as hell.

01:03:32.360 And it's like, seriously, surreally, this is Pulp Fiction weird.

01:03:37.320 So what do you think the unifying principle is?

01:03:39.880 To me, it's that they love America.

01:03:42.500 Like, that's sort of like the, you would say, low-resolution bumper sticker.

01:03:45.320 I think they're all iconic masks, too, and 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.

01:03:55.040 Like, there wasn't anything really that we had in common.

01:04:00.000 Let's say you and I, or Weinstein, or Rogan, Shapiro.

01:04:05.720 Like, that was a very diverse group of people.

01:04:10.140 It was free speech in the most, I guess, in the essence.

01:04:12.940 Yeah, yeah, it was, well, I think the thing we had in common, essentially, was our approach to discourse.

01:04:18.380 Yeah.

01:04:18.820 That was really all.

01:04:20.080 Yeah.

01:04:20.360 I mean, you know, each of us taken in pairs had things in common.

01:04:25.240 But it was devotion to discourse, open discourse, conversational discourse, essentially.

01:04:32.820 Yeah.

01:04:33.280 And in a way, in a sense, agenda-free conversational discourse.

01:04:38.640 I mean, one of the things that makes Rogan so perennially popular is that he's just trying to figure out what's going on.

01:04:46.020 And that really is the case.

01:04:47.660 Yeah.

01:04:47.780 And you know Rogan.

01:04:48.580 You know that what you see is what you get.

01:04:50.320 He's exactly, all you people, all the people in that group are exactly the same on camera and off.

01:04:55.380 Yeah.

01:04:55.600 Exactly.

01:04:56.040 There's no persona.

01:04:57.340 They're just exactly who they are.

01:04:59.860 And so, and I, and all of those people were and are iconoclastic, right?

01:05:07.520 They didn't fit well in organizations.

01:05:09.400 They all started their own thing.

01:05:10.740 And that's really the same thing that's characteristic of these people that have gathered around Trump.

01:05:15.640 And then, as we alluded to, we also have this other strange occurrence, which is the death throes of the legacy media.

01:05:26.460 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.

01:05:31.560 There is the New York Post, for example.

01:05:33.700 The Fox News people are trying to do their best.

01:05:35.860 Sure.

01:05:36.260 You know, you have the free press with Barry, but that's new media too.

01:05:39.540 So, by and large, the liberal end of the legacy media have doomed themselves to perdition because they got partisan and deceitful.

01:05:50.920 And they were also willingly blind because they didn't pay attention to the new media at all.

01:05:55.840 Well, nobody could be that bad at their job.

01:05:58.540 No janitor could be so horrible at his job and still have a job the next day.

01:06:03.820 Joe Scarborough lies every day.

01:06:06.060 He sits in a chair at MSNBC at a giant corporation to lie.

01:06:10.860 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.

01:06:17.180 They know that Joy Reid is, in essence, a neo-racist or that Rachel Maddow spent three years relentlessly lying about vaccines and COVID.

01:06:26.460 So, what people, I think, have to understand is they're paid to lie.

01:06:30.300 They are well paid to push a particular narrative.

01:06:34.300 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.

01:06:48.620 Right, exactly.

01:06:49.080 They're not investigative.

01:06:52.240 They're not independent investigative journalists.

01:06:54.060 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.

01:07:02.300 Sure.

01:07:02.420 Because I don't know, apart from podcaster, I don't know what the definition is.

01:07:06.640 So...

01:07:06.860 Yeah.

01:07:08.040 It's something like I'm trying to translate the nonsense, but that's not a...

01:07:13.520 Talk show host?

01:07:14.260 Yeah, I'm a talk show host.

01:07:15.860 Yeah, yeah, that's really what he did.

01:07:16.020 Whatever Phil Donahue was, that's what I am.

01:07:17.800 Yeah, yeah, well, that's, yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right.

01:07:20.400 That's what I'm doing with my podcast, too.

01:07:22.180 They're talk shows, like...

01:07:23.120 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?

01:07:33.240 Why is it that my track record, I get political predictions wrong all the time.

01:07:36.660 I thought DeSantis could win the primary.

01:07:38.820 I have no problem admitting that.

01:07:39.920 There was a different way the Republicans could go.

01:07:41.920 And by the way, I'm thrilled with the result.

01:07:43.420 I couldn't be happier.

01:07:44.100 I fought for Trump and all that stuff.

01:07:46.100 So putting aside political predictions, why is it that I didn't screw up all...

01:07:50.000 Why didn't I fall for all of the hoaxes?

01:07:51.860 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?

01:08:05.000 Yeah, Kamala Harris immediately tweeted out that this proves we're a white supremacist nation, and I think that's still...

01:08:10.080 I think that tweet is still up.

01:08:11.380 Why is it that MSNBC fell for every hoax?

01:08:14.360 Why is it that I didn't fall for all of the COVID hoaxes?

01:08:16.860 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.

01:08:22.080 It's not because I'm some kind of genius.

01:08:24.320 Why did you not fall for all these hoaxes?

01:08:26.240 Why did Rogan not really fall for all these hoaxes?

01:08:28.300 And everyone, I'd say to some degree, we all got screwed up by COVID in some ways.

01:08:32.140 And I think you've even said that you got...

01:08:35.360 I think I did your first interview back 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.

01:08:46.540 Yeah, yeah.

01:08:47.120 That is what I thought.

01:08:48.040 I thought, okay.

01:08:48.760 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.

01:08:54.040 Yeah, yeah, well.

01:08:54.440 I thought, if I do it, they'll never leave me alone.

01:08:57.080 And I think that that actually turned out to be more true in some sense.

01:09:01.020 Oh, definitely.

01:09:01.400 Oh, yeah, 100%.

01:09:02.460 Yeah, well, I...

01:09:03.500 But what is it about us, then?

01:09:05.540 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?

01:09:19.100 So you can go out and scavenge for information.

01:09:21.780 That's the other thing, too, is the information environment that surrounds you.

01:09:26.320 This is a point they made on MSNBC.

01:09:29.040 I think it was the guy who runs Axios who was the commentator.

01:09:32.100 I think we're going to probably clip that into this show.

01:09:35.540 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.

01:09:46.860 Like, I gather information from, well, I'm on Axios a fair bit, but I gather information from a lot of different sources.

01:09:52.840 It's not an easy thing to do.

01:09:54.320 And so the information pipeline that you have isn't a legacy media monolith by any stretch of the imagination.

01:10:01.320 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.

01:10:15.840 Everybody thinks the same thing.

01:10:17.220 Right.

01:10:17.360 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.

01:10:25.160 But now he literally can't see where he's swimming.

01:10:27.180 I mean, think about it.

01:10:27.720 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.

01:10:37.580 2019.

01:10:38.200 Again, I'm not a doctor.

01:10:39.300 I was just watching the videos like everybody else.

01:10:41.560 I watched the corn pop video.

01:10:43.020 How much time do you spend every week looking at media information?

01:10:47.040 No, an awful lot.

01:10:48.320 How much do you think?

01:10:49.680 I mean, I would say I'm definitely within, I mean, within the ex-Twitter ecosystem a couple hours a day.

01:10:56.500 So that's a pretty significant amount of time.

01:10:58.300 I try not to do it on the weekends.

01:10:59.960 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.

01:11:11.400 But the Biden cognitive issue, they lied and lied and lied.

01:11:15.700 And they kept saying, don't see what you see.

01:11:17.900 Well, he's still president.

01:11:18.860 And he's still president right now.

01:11:20.780 I know.

01:11:21.260 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.

01:11:27.780 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.

01:11:38.260 And I hope they'll take this.

01:11:39.600 The opportunity is you have no reason to placate to the left.

01:11:42.620 You were brought in because you were old Joe the moderate.

01:11:44.680 You weren't crazy Bernie.

01:11:45.960 You weren't Elizabeth Warren.

01:11:47.240 You weren't one of the radicals.

01:11:48.560 You governed like one of them.

01:11:49.860 They took advantage of you.

01:11:51.180 But now they clearly tried to screw you by forcing him out.

01:11:54.800 He's basically said that.

01:11:55.920 I mean, that's what he said on The View, that they forced him out.

01:11:58.320 He thought he was going to win.

01:11:59.400 So we'll find out what happened there one day because eventually the truth will come out.

01:12:03.180 But what an interesting moment he has right now.

01:12:05.100 He has two months to say, I have no reason to play with you children anymore.

01:12:09.980 And I can build a legacy.

01:12:11.580 So what could my legacy be?

01:12:12.760 Well, maybe Donald Trump's not Hitler.

01:12:15.360 And maybe I could do a few things like, I don't know, maybe somehow winding down some portion of the Iraq war or helping Israel win their war, getting our hostages back, the American hostages, if not the Israelis.

01:12:26.380 Or maybe doing something about the border, which they are doing a little more now.

01:12:29.680 He has an interesting moment right now where his legacy could be, he took us to the precipice of hell.

01:12:35.920 He got taken advantage of, right?

01:12:37.840 They'll write about it one day.

01:12:39.460 But then right there, when he had a moment, the two months between administrations, he did something right.

01:12:44.960 And I really, I don't think that's completely, a lot of people are saying I'm nuts for that.

01:12:48.640 But if you were Joe Biden, and again, we don't know what's really in his mind or what he's capable of.

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01:14:12.300 Cognitively at this point.

01:14:13.280 But wouldn't that be a pretty good ending to the story?

01:14:15.940 That would be a good ending.

01:14:17.300 That would also help the Democrats get back on track.

01:14:19.860 So if it's a story...

01:14:20.960 Maybe we'll get lucky too.

01:14:22.680 So in the last month of the campaign, we had all these strange people aggregate around Trump,

01:14:27.640 and that was a game changer, as far as I was concerned.

01:14:30.000 That was it.

01:14:30.560 Because it really helped put my concerns about a Trump administration to rest.

01:14:34.560 And then we had the spectacle of him turning to the podcast world,

01:14:38.700 and he did that with accruing success.

01:14:42.320 Like, you could see that he had some trepidation to begin with,

01:14:47.360 but as he found out what that ecosystem was like,

01:14:50.620 you know, we can forgive him for not discovering that earlier,

01:14:53.000 because he is 78, you know, I mean...

01:14:55.440 And he did do some of it, by the way.

01:14:56.860 I mean, he did my show when he was president.

01:14:59.020 So he was bouncing in and out, but he...

01:15:01.860 Yes, you're totally right that he went hardcore,

01:15:04.220 I'm going to sit down with the Nelk boys while they're talking about,

01:15:07.160 you know, Spiked Seltzer, and then Rogan and everything else.

01:15:09.300 And with Theo Vaughn.

01:15:10.300 And Theo, which was great, which was really great.

01:15:12.360 Yeah, it was great. It was great.

01:15:13.540 And then, of course, the capstone was obviously Rogan.

01:15:18.460 And then they tried to censor that on YouTube, right?

01:15:21.440 Which was just beyond comprehension, that they mucked up the search algorithms.

01:15:25.800 I just couldn't believe that.

01:15:27.040 But again, they knew they were going to get caught.

01:15:29.580 And this is the thing that I'm still stuck on.

01:15:31.780 I'm not stuck on that they lie.

01:15:33.420 And I'm not stuck on that they put themselves in an ecosystem

01:15:36.040 where the lies then become pervasive.

01:15:38.980 I'm stuck on the other part.

01:15:40.540 Like, you know you're going to get...

01:15:42.000 Obama knows he's going to get caught.

01:15:43.680 YouTube knows that they're going to get called out for the algorithmic tricks.

01:15:47.900 And yet they still do it.

01:15:48.760 Well, they took...

01:15:49.260 And that shows you...

01:15:49.980 YouTube took down the interview, the first interview I did with RFK during the presidential election.

01:15:55.240 They took it down.

01:15:55.880 I thought the Democrats were screeching for months about Russian collusion and election interference.

01:16:03.100 And yet you're willing to censor an actual presidential candidate with an actual two-hour interview.

01:16:10.380 And that's somehow...

01:16:11.340 That's okay.

01:16:12.060 Somehow that's okay.

01:16:13.220 It's like...

01:16:13.580 Well, it's funny.

01:16:13.980 It's funny.

01:16:14.520 You say the Democrats and you're talking about YouTube.

01:16:16.520 And that shows you...

01:16:17.420 Yeah, right, right.

01:16:17.620 That shows you the connection between these things, right?

01:16:20.500 So that is what drove us all together.

01:16:22.660 That's another thing to point out, too, when the Democrats are carping about not having access to this new media.

01:16:28.180 It's like, well, all the YouTube censors, let's point out, are on your side.

01:16:33.280 And you bloody well had Twitter, too, until Musk took it over.

01:16:36.600 Jordan, I don't know what year it was.

01:16:38.520 2019, maybe?

01:16:39.420 There was a cover story on Sunday, New York Times, with me, you, Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, I think Tim Poole, a couple other people, that we were the YouTube leaders of the alt-right.

01:16:50.800 And they did an entire piece about, multi-page piece, about how the YouTube algorithms were driving people to the right.

01:16:59.420 Yeah.

01:16:59.560 Think how absolutely bananas that are now in retrospect.

01:17:03.260 They had the entire machine.

01:17:05.820 They had the entire machine.

01:17:07.600 They used it against all of us while telling us that we were the ones using them, in essence.

01:17:13.180 And I guess they got their comeuppance, and that's the beautiful part of this.

01:17:16.900 Yeah, well, thank God for free speech.

01:17:19.800 That's for sure.

01:17:21.400 Yeah.

01:17:22.040 That's why we're happy to have you in America, because it's not going so well up in your country.

01:17:27.180 Yeah, that's for sure, man.

01:17:29.260 Liberals up there.

01:17:30.220 Well, so here's something interesting, I guess, insofar as Canadian politics is interesting.

01:17:36.440 But the world is such now, and so upside down, that even Canadian politics has become interesting.

01:17:42.640 It's like, oh, oh, that's not good.

01:17:44.640 And so Stephen Guilbeau, 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.

01:17:54.540 Right.

01:17:54.700 Right, 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.

01:18:06.240 There's a socialist party in Canada.

01:18:08.400 That's the NDP.

01:18:09.440 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.

01:18:18.240 It's like the progressives just invaded it.

01:18:20.460 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.

01:18:27.920 And now they're proclaiming that outright.

01:18:30.400 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?

01:18:38.160 The good liberal who allowed all of this to come in?

01:18:42.680 This is a compassion issue?

01:18:44.360 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.

01:18:56.100 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 only works when the collective is so well established that you can take it for granted.

01:19:17.860 So as long as the self-evident truths remain self-evident, then you can have something like a liberal individualism.

01:19:26.540 So it's basically, as long as the conservatives are holding the door from the barbarians, then the liberals can be liberal.

01:19:32.340 Yeah, yeah, exactly that.

01:19:33.560 And that's how a functional society should work, in essence.

01:19:35.820 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?

01:19:44.920 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:19:45.480 And they're all these hobbits.

01:19:47.680 They're smoking some stuff.

01:19:48.840 Yeah, they're hobbits, and they're all pursuing their own thing, and they think their little kingdom is everything.

01:19:53.340 But, you know, the borders are protected by the striders.

01:19:57.320 Aragorn is one of them, and it turns out that he's the descendant of ancient kings.

01:20:01.560 And that's exactly right.

01:20:02.780 It's like, as long as the perimeters are defended by the descendants of ancient kings, then there can be freedom inside the walls.

01:20:09.660 And so, 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.

01:20:20.860 But we are at a point where the self-evident is no longer self-evident and needs to be explained and defended.

01:20:28.560 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.

01:20:36.640 It's like, well, all these things that are self-evident have to be restated and also explained.

01:20:43.280 Right.

01:20:43.520 You wouldn't have had to have written 12 rules for life had the system been operating properly.

01:20:49.280 That's the point.

01:20:50.040 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,

01:21:01.540 it would not be necessary to say things that are just, why would you pet a cat when you walk by it?

01:21:07.080 Well, there's a reason.

01:21:08.360 There's actually a reason.

01:21:09.460 You remember the way, I'll tell you a funny story in a sec.

01:21:10.960 But, you know, Douglas, the line on this about the walls that Douglas has that I love, I love this.

01:21:17.500 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.

01:21:23.660 And I think that's what happened to the liberals.

01:21:25.260 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.

01:21:34.380 But instead of confronting what was going on, how good they had it, they decided to just, ah, we'll let the crazy people just keep running around.

01:21:43.480 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.

01:21:49.240 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.

01:21:55.980 And I think that that's really what's happened here.

01:21:57.760 It was sort of like, you know, when they took Alex Jones out originally.

01:22:02.760 I had done Alex Jones' show one time.

01:22:04.760 It's the only time we ever spoke publicly.

01:22:06.820 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.

01:22:11.400 It's all crazy.

01:22:12.120 You know, we all have certain pressure points that we deal with and how much heat you want to take and everything else.

01:22:15.720 I think in retrospect, we all should have been screaming much, much louder.

01:22:19.300 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.

01:22:24.940 That we all just thought, ah, it'll kind of never come for us.

01:22:28.000 And to Trump's credit, by the way, what was his main line is, they're not coming for me.

01:22:31.700 They're coming for you.

01:22:32.480 I'm just standing in the way.

01:22:33.560 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:22:34.100 Well, the fact that he got kicked off Twitter was a perfect example of that.

01:22:37.720 That was just beyond comprehension as far as I was concerned.

01:22:40.760 Well.

01:22:41.040 What?

01:22:41.680 Really?

01:22:42.420 Really?

01:22:43.120 Come on.

01:22:44.080 When I went to Twitter, when I got a call one day from someone at Twitter, basically saying, Elon wants to meet you.

01:22:50.820 Can you get here tonight?

01:22:51.820 It was about three o'clock on a Tuesday or something, Tuesday or Thursday.

01:22:56.420 And I called everybody I knew who had a private plane.

01:22:59.300 I was like, somebody's got to get me over there.

01:23:00.640 Nobody can get on.

01:23:01.240 I jump on a plane.

01:23:02.060 I get to Twitter at about 12.30 a.m.

01:23:03.820 This is like a week or two after he bought Twitter.

01:23:07.000 And he comes out, you know, there's all these people there.

01:23:09.220 It's just such a buzz, right?

01:23:10.460 And he comes out.

01:23:11.160 It's about 12.30 a.m.

01:23:12.240 His eyes are bloodshot.

01:23:14.800 And he's clearly tired, right?

01:23:17.000 And you've met him many times now.

01:23:18.320 He dresses like a normal guy.

01:23:19.960 He's in like this ratty t-shirt.

01:23:21.480 It's late at night.

01:23:22.440 You know, his sneakers are dirty.

01:23:23.920 And he's clearly been there for God knows how long.

01:23:25.840 Probably hasn't slept in-

01:23:26.580 Five years.

01:23:27.200 Yeah.

01:23:27.680 Probably hasn't slept in however, right?

01:23:30.280 And he says to me, he goes, Dave, I heard about what's been going on with your account.

01:23:34.300 He's like, do you want to do this tonight?

01:23:36.360 Or if it's okay, could we do it tomorrow?

01:23:39.080 I was like, this is insane.

01:23:40.980 The world's richest man is basically like, can I work for you tonight at 1 a.m.?

01:23:46.080 I was like, oh, it's actually okay.

01:23:47.620 I'll come back tomorrow.

01:23:48.760 And then I sat there the next day with a whole bunch of engineers who opened the hood of the

01:23:53.180 thing.

01:23:53.380 And the entire system, the entire Twitter system was built to shadow ban.

01:23:58.340 That's it.

01:23:59.380 Everything under the hood of Twitter was built to put filters and tags.

01:24:03.560 And you said this, so now you can't see this.

01:24:05.760 Or you connected with that person, so now you can't connect with this person.

01:24:08.680 The entire system was built that way.

01:24:10.640 So Jack Dorsey, who was the CEO for much of it, he testified under oath that they do not shadow ban.

01:24:16.460 But the whole freaking system was built that way.

01:24:18.700 Now, he probably legally didn't get in trouble because shadow ban is not a technical term.

01:24:23.160 And he may have, you know, I think he was just playing with the words there.

01:24:26.760 But the point is, there was an entire system basically built to silence a certain set of

01:24:32.160 people and promote another set of people.

01:24:34.640 And it didn't work.

01:24:35.620 And it didn't work.

01:24:36.600 So how cool is that?

01:24:37.880 How cool is that?

01:24:38.880 And that's where we're at right now.

01:24:40.640 How incredible, actually.

01:24:41.960 Yeah, that's for sure.

01:24:43.660 That's for sure.

01:24:45.160 Well, Dave, I guess we could turn back to Canada for a moment.

01:24:49.260 Yeah, sorry, I went on a tangent there.

01:24:51.260 No, no, no, no, that's fine.

01:24:53.160 So the radicals have definitely taken over Canada.

01:24:57.400 And it's really quite bad.

01:25:00.580 So when Trudeau was elected, we were at parity for per person GDP in Canada.

01:25:06.460 And that's historically about where Canada has been.

01:25:09.500 Sometimes a little ahead.

01:25:10.800 Parity with America, you mean?

01:25:12.440 Parity with America.

01:25:13.580 Sometimes a little behind.

01:25:14.780 More often a little behind.

01:25:15.980 But now we're at 60%.

01:25:18.580 Canadians are poorer in per capita GDP than Mississippi residents.

01:25:24.720 Right?

01:25:25.260 And our real estate is twice as expensive.

01:25:28.220 Right?

01:25:28.480 And so now the upside is that, unfortunately, well, I said the upside.

01:25:35.420 The upside is that it's over, but it won't come to its conclusion for a year.

01:25:42.920 Right?

01:25:43.800 Polyev is going to be the next prime minister unless some bloody, completely unforeseen catastrophe occurs.

01:25:49.500 And that strikes me as unlikely.

01:25:50.840 And the liberals, who are now the socialists, farther to the left than the NDP, who are the actual socialists, they're going to get demolished so hard that they might disappear federally.

01:26:02.760 It's going to be a bloodbath.

01:26:04.440 And it's so well-deserved.

01:26:06.320 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.

01:26:14.040 And maybe he will.

01:26:15.080 Trudeau has a year.

01:26:16.040 And I believe that Trudeau is a wounded narcissist.

01:26:20.800 So, I thought he was narcissistic right from the beginning.

01:26:24.680 And the reason I believed that was because he had no right to put himself forward as prime minister.

01:26:33.680 He had no resume.

01:26:35.200 He didn't know anything.

01:26:37.240 All he had was a name that he didn't make known.

01:26:42.840 His father did.

01:26:43.480 Yep.

01:26:43.940 That's all he had.

01:26:44.860 Well, no, it's not at all.

01:26:46.220 He was a drama teacher.

01:26:47.500 Well, he was also good looking.

01:26:49.180 And he was graceful.

01:26:50.020 And he was charming.

01:26:51.480 And he knew how to behave in public.

01:26:54.000 That's run pretty thin, though.

01:26:55.340 I know.

01:26:56.540 But it wasn't nothing.

01:26:57.540 Yeah.

01:26:57.980 Right.

01:26:58.260 So, you want to give the devil his due.

01:26:59.980 Yeah.

01:27:00.160 But in terms of competence, that was just completely lacking.

01:27:05.000 And also, the ability to see that he didn't have the knowledge or the ability to run a country.

01:27:11.040 That was lacking.

01:27:11.780 Now, when he was first approached, I thought, okay, you could refuse.

01:27:19.860 Or because of the heritage of your family, let's say, you don't want the conservatives to win.

01:27:27.500 And so, you decide to stand for prime minister.

01:27:30.280 But you understand very clearly that you don't know what the hell you're doing at all.

01:27:33.960 And so, you surround yourself with people who are experts, and you let them teach you.

01:27:40.100 And he did none of that.

01:27:41.780 I mean, he set up a cabinet that was half women in 2015.

01:27:46.460 And that's why he said he did it, because it was 2015, even though only one in four MPs were women.

01:27:51.500 But so, he set up a bad cabinet to begin with, because he over-selected from 25% of the population.

01:27:59.260 And that was all virtue signaling.

01:28:01.220 And so, he started out as a narcissist, and he never changed.

01:28:05.540 And now, one of the problems with narcissists is that when everybody likes them, they can be quite benevolent, because their greatness is recognized.

01:28:17.980 But when people decide that they're detestable, which is pretty much where Trudeau has got in Canada,

01:28:24.160 it's very hard for him to go out in public now without people, like, literally cursing him, then it's time for revenge.

01:28:31.800 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,

01:28:39.680 which is, it makes Bill C-16, which was the one I objected to, look like child's play.

01:28:44.700 This is the most totalitarian bill I've ever seen a Western country produce by a large margin.

01:28:50.640 This is about registering the news organizations?

01:28:52.700 That's part of it, part of it.

01:28:54.240 Well, it's called, it's a bill to, bill to reduce online harms.

01:28:57.500 That's its name.

01:28:58.360 And it starts out with a description of how children are going to be protected from sexual predators online, and it ends with that.

01:29:05.880 But in the middle, there's a whole new bureaucracy that has all the powers of a judiciary, and it's, that's infinitely expandable,

01:29:14.900 that isn't bound by the rules of standard evidence, which it says in the bill, which is just beyond comprehension to me.

01:29:21.860 And it has pretty much unlimited powers of seizure and investigation and punishment, life in prison for hate crime with all these protected groups.

01:29:33.520 And the worst of it is that this is, I can't even believe this can possibly be true.

01:29:39.840 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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01:29:52.360 We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.

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01:30:07.820 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.

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01:30:26.800 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

01:30:35.320 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,

01:30:47.060 he'll affix an electronic surveillance bracelet to your leg and keep you in your house for a year.

01:30:53.260 It's pre-crime.

01:30:54.160 It's pre-crime.

01:30:54.740 You saw a minority report, it's pre-crime.

01:30:56.640 It's pre-crime, absolutely, absolutely.

01:30:59.400 And this is the weirdest part of it.

01:31:01.580 I can't even believe that this can possibly be true, that 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.

01:31:13.180 I think what happened was that's a requirement if you're in a domestic abuse case, right?

01:31:18.440 Because, you know, if you're drunk, you're much more likely to be a domestic abuser.

01:31:22.900 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.

01:31:31.640 But as a defense against what?

01:31:34.840 The kind of pre-crime that, well, that's exactly it.

01:31:37.660 It's like someone's afraid that you might do something that is hateful.

01:31:42.020 So, well, that's just part of it.

01:31:44.140 They need to take him up on that.

01:31:45.820 That would be something.

01:31:46.860 That's how the movie ends.

01:31:48.000 He gets taken up on the same law that he put out, right?

01:31:50.420 Yeah, yeah.

01:31:50.820 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?

01:31:58.780 Because there's a truncated period of time.

01:32:01.060 Basically, what you're saying to me is because Trudeau now has too much time, it could go, it could really go much worse.

01:32:07.640 I'm virtually certain that that's what will happen.

01:32:09.300 Do you think if he had a truncated period of time like Biden does, that it would get better?

01:32:12.980 Because he would be looking at the end much more closely.

01:32:15.820 So that's interesting.

01:32:16.680 So you think there's something, so I agree with that, too.

01:32:19.740 I think all of them will be out for revenge.

01:32:21.580 I mean, I can already see that Stephen Guilbault, who's, he's the worst sort of progressive imaginable.

01:32:29.260 He would sacrifice the poor to his green delusions.

01:32:32.280 He is, that's exactly what he is doing.

01:32:34.060 That's what he's doing.

01:32:35.080 He's already declared war, essentially, on the Western provinces and Alberta in particular,

01:32:39.340 even though his own province, Quebec, depends on the money Alberta sends them to maintain anything that resembles an advanced industrial economy.

01:32:48.860 So I think they'll really do damage to Canada in the next year.

01:32:52.180 And then Paul Yev will have to come in and mop up.

01:32:55.700 And he's going to have a very tough fight on his hands because things are worse in Canada than Canadians believe.

01:33:03.200 And they're likely worse than I know.

01:33:05.640 And we won't know how bad they are till Paul Yev takes power.

01:33:09.260 And then they'll all be blamed on him.

01:33:12.360 So, yeah.

01:33:14.220 So things are, so Canadians are in for a rough time.

01:33:17.620 And they haven't woken up, I wouldn't say, you know, I wouldn't say that the typical Canadian, for example, was a Trump supporter, right?

01:33:25.700 They're still trapped in that centrist, progressive mindset that is completely ignorant of the danger of the radical leftists.

01:33:37.400 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.

01:33:43.420 Yeah.

01:33:43.820 They're everywhere I go now, there are Canadians everywhere.

01:33:47.000 And they're like, you know, I don't know that they're not, technically they're supposed to go back at some point, of course.

01:33:51.960 But like, they're staying a lot longer than they used to, for sure.

01:33:55.400 Like, even this summer, you know.

01:33:57.060 Yeah.

01:33:57.380 You don't have a lot of Canadians usually coming to a Florida summer.

01:33:59.980 Yeah.

01:34:00.160 But they are because they realize what's going on there.

01:34:02.340 Yeah, yeah.

01:34:03.160 So you need Canada to wake up to its sense of adventure.

01:34:05.120 That's for sure.

01:34:05.800 Well, there are signs of improvement.

01:34:08.460 You know, Daniel Smith's tough as a boot, the premier of Alberta.

01:34:11.520 And Pauliev, as far as I can tell, he's a man with a spine.

01:34:15.840 He's not easy to push around.

01:34:17.740 And I think he's sensible.

01:34:19.560 And I actually do think that he actually cares about working class people.

01:34:24.660 So, like the Trump.

01:34:26.760 Like Trump, weirdly enough, because Trump actually cares about working class people.

01:34:31.180 And so, having worked with them for so long as well, and so, and understands them as well,

01:34:36.260 which is, and the Democrats made that decision under Hillary Clinton to throw the white working

01:34:40.820 class in particular just under the bus.

01:34:42.620 And so, c'est la vie, man.

01:34:44.240 God, they had no reason to do that.

01:34:45.920 Well, I guess the reason was to attain power.

01:34:47.960 And they did it for quite some time.

01:34:48.920 They made a calculated risk to go for the marginal and all right.

01:34:54.740 Your line about the fringe of the fringe, I quote on my show often too, because that's

01:34:58.720 the other part that could sort of trap us.

01:35:01.140 As we sort of split and we were all online getting our own news sources and scavenging,

01:35:05.960 as you said.

01:35:06.520 Yeah.

01:35:07.580 There's always going to be new fringes.

01:35:09.240 Like that's really going to be the new thing.

01:35:10.900 The one argument you could make for the mainstream or the corporate would be that it did keep the

01:35:14.320 Overton window a little bit like this.

01:35:16.520 So we all at least dealt with some, even if the reality was very skewed to what was really

01:35:20.340 real, at least it was a little bit within the lanes.

01:35:23.400 Yeah, no, I think you're right.

01:35:23.800 And now, now we're dancing out here all the time.

01:35:26.200 And I think that's going to be, and then when you throw AI on top of that, that's going

01:35:29.720 to be, that's going to really be the next challenge.

01:35:32.080 Let me give you something before we wrap up this 500th Jordan Peterson podcast.

01:35:38.380 You can read, you can read the card privately, but that's from a couple of weeks.

01:35:44.320 And I think it's a nice, not bad, right?

01:35:48.360 We're both much better looking in that picture than we actually are.

01:35:51.460 So that's good.

01:35:52.420 Nothing a little Photoshop, can't you?

01:35:53.860 A little high contrast Photoshop.

01:35:55.660 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:35:56.680 Exactly.

01:35:57.100 Did you run it through the AI filter that, that, that, what does that do?

01:36:00.340 That makes your eyes a little wider?

01:36:01.980 I have a team of many people who can do all sorts of tricks.

01:36:04.600 You know what I mean?

01:36:05.180 There's a, we're going to look as good as we can right there.

01:36:07.460 But, but even just doing that together after all these years, it was like, it was like the

01:36:12.480 perfect sort of next phase of where we're at with all of this.

01:36:16.080 You know, we talked about the ideas.

01:36:18.620 I built a tech company in the middle of all of this.

01:36:20.480 Yeah, right.

01:36:20.860 We tried to, we tried to do together.

01:36:22.480 We didn't even tell that story today.

01:36:24.060 Let me just say one thing, because you probably, it's probably never been said publicly before,

01:36:26.980 but everyone knows all the great things about you.

01:36:29.620 But when, when you were starting to get sick and we were working on the idea together,

01:36:34.620 you, you had had your version of it at first and I put in a hundred thousand dollars.

01:36:40.900 And then you realized that you were not going to be available for a while.

01:36:45.140 And I think the last time we spoke for then a year was you saying, Dave, take, take the

01:36:49.540 money back.

01:36:49.940 Cause if I can't be involved in this, you should take them.

01:36:51.620 I don't even know if you remember that even, but like, you didn't have to do that.

01:36:54.940 You didn't have to do that.

01:36:55.480 And then with that money, I then started locals and then, and then that all, that all worked.

01:36:59.680 Yeah.

01:37:00.000 So we, we did.

01:37:00.920 So anyway, I, I brought you that cause I thought it was a nice that we then ended up on stage

01:37:04.940 just weeks before the election with RFK and Tulsi and so many of these people we've talked

01:37:09.180 about.

01:37:09.560 Oh, so that was at DC.

01:37:10.800 That was DC just a couple of weeks ago.

01:37:12.380 Yeah.

01:37:12.800 And, and what a wild and crazy ride it has been.

01:37:15.400 That's, that's for sure.

01:37:18.560 And the thing is, it's not over.

01:37:21.600 Yeah.

01:37:22.460 Good to see you, Dave.

01:37:23.360 Good to see you, my man.

01:37:24.020 Yeah.

01:37:24.380 Thanks for coming in.

01:37:25.460 So as you know, everybody, we've got another half an hour on the Daily Wire side.

01:37:30.000 And so I'll continue my conversation with Mr. Rubin there.

01:37:35.920 And you're obviously all invited to come over to the dark side, the Daily Wire people and

01:37:40.920 throw a little support their way, which is, I always think a good investment given that

01:37:45.820 they've been staunch defenders of the very free speech that we've been talking about

01:37:50.360 and right from the beginning.

01:37:51.560 And so with all this shakeup in the media world, what the Daily Wire doing, is doing

01:37:58.020 is, well, continues to be of who knows how much import.

01:38:03.820 So join us on the Daily Wire side.

01:38:05.620 Thanks again, Dave.

01:38:06.520 My pleasure.

01:38:06.880 Pretty good to see you.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - November 21, 2024

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

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