Decoding the Gurus - Dave Rubin: A Pointless Partisan Pundit

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

Dave Rubin has always sought out a career in the spotlight, beginning with stand-up comedy and then becoming a pundit (of sorts) on shows like the Young Turks. From there he (in)famously came to present himself as one of those classical liberals forced to 'leave the left'. He was also one of the honorary members of the Intellectual Dark Web although it is fair to say he primarily served as a conduit rather than a primary contributor. So, where does he stand now? Is he the heterodox classical liberal and centrist he once claimed? Or is he a reactionary and conspiratorial hyper-partisan right-wing pundit? It's the second thing. It's obviously the second thing. Everyone knows.But could he be anything more than that? Does he fit the secular guru template beguiling us with pseudo-intellectual, polymathic and galaxy-brained takes? Or just a slightly more acceptable version of Alex Jones without the drinking problem?Well, in this episode we'll figure it out. To be honest, it's not very complicated. The riddle of Dave Rubin is not so much a deep rabbit hole as a minor depression in the ground. So... Enjoy?P.S. We also talk (probably for too long) about "discourse surfing" in relation to topics like the lab leak and why you shouldn't do it. Don't worry. There are bookmarks, so you can skip it if you want (though you shouldn't really, it's good).LinksCritical Profile of Dave Rubin by Ross Anderson at QuilletteGreta Thunberg Gets Caught by Rebel News & Her Response Is Bizarre | Direct Message | Rubin ReportDave Rubin | Club Random with Bill MaherFor 'Discourse Surfing' see Stuart Ritchie's article at inews. Stop blindly believing or dismissing the Covid lab-leak theory – focus on the evidenceThe Wall Street Journal article that reignited the Lab Leak conversationOur previous episode 'Calibrating the Gurometer'

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Music Music Music Music Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru. It's a podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Professor Matthew Brown.

With me is my trusty junior co-host, Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh, the Man Friday to my Robinson Crusoe, but nevertheless an indispensable part of the podcast. Thanks for joining us, Chris. Roger, Roger. You're looking well today. Looking youthful, full of vim and vigor. Not the kind of guy that would be having a nap at midday

or two more nights of podcast. That's what I like to see. That's what I like to see. That's what I like to see. It's true. It's true. We were meant to be recording this yesterday. I felt too weary. So weary.

Just got a message saying, my old bones, they're acting up. Oh, yeah, it's true. It takes a certain level of inner gumption to be able to tackle dave rubin um and you chris but um i think i'm up to speed yeah bones yeah i just want to remind everyone that the reason we're doing dave rubin today is that we were intending to do dave rubin and bill maher together to get them both out of the way we don't want to do the Dave Rubin nobody wants to talk about Dave Rubin but we we went to the baller of listening to him and clipping him so we're not having done that for nothing

we have to make the episode but we do realize that bill maher and dave rubin are not fantastic fits for the guru no it's kind of an open and shut case like if this was like a sherlock holmes novella it would be like three pages oh it was the guy with the knife if it was a house episode, it'd be like, oh, you've got the common cold. It's always lupus. Yeah. So, you know, look, Bill Maher is going to show up again, but now you have the ground prepped for him from our previous episode. And the people who complained, the small number of people who complained, which is all right. We're open to

feedback that Bill Maher doesn't fit the template. I just want to explain to them one thing, which is this show, we have a garometer thing, which we sometimes reference, which is because we were covering people who were a little bit different and varied on different axes that we decided to try and quantify in a way the differences between them. And so we came up with these 10 factors that we commonly see. And for each person that we cover, we rate them on those factors and people score differently. Some of the people we score, score very high on the secular guru template some of the people don't score highly this is actually good having some people that are in the middle or score lowly one it's just useful to have a distribution a variation of the people so that you can you can see the

difference between like the people that completely fit the template but two it helps people realize that it does not mean that somebody not fitting the secular guru template is someone that we like right i don't like bill maher very much and he didn't score highly on the grometer but that doesn't mean oh i really love bill maher and that's why i you know scored him relatively low overall it's just that he doesn't fit that template so this is a good thing to emphasize that i suspect i don't know yet that dave rubin will score middling because he might want to be a guru but he's a bit of an idiot. So, yeah, but he's just, you know, a partisan pundit. And partisan pundit is not what secular guru means.

They often are partisan pundits as well. It's not the core of the definition category. Okay, so what you're saying is that this guru pejorative isn't just a way for us to stick it to characters that we don't like or are ideologically opposed to. It's actually science. That's what you're saying. It's both, Matt.

It just depends on what day of the week or what mood you catch us in as to how we're using it. But yes, typically speaking, we are striving to use it in a less pejorative sense, or at least allow that there could be bad non-gurus and good gurus. Although, to be honest, if you score highly on the grub, this is the part that's a little bit confusing, because a lot of the factors are negatively

violent like conspiracy mongering grievance mongering and and so on so if if you're doing those the chances that you're a good secular guru it's probably quite low but but there may be good secular gurus out there that's that's we're on the search we're on the search it's it's very complicated see even you're getting confused for anyone We're on the search. It's very complicated. See, even you're getting confused. For anyone who's struggling to follow along, there's at least three different ways in which you can define a guru. Firstly, it could be someone we cover, right?

Someone who meets the bar to actually be covered on our show. They're on the show called Decoding the Gurus. Ergo, we must thank their gurus to decode. That's one way. then there's the you know they actually are kind of a secular guru like carl sagan he's kind of like a guru character but he doesn't show many of those toxic traits and then the scoring high on our grometer which is the more it's it's like a toxic secular guru scale really i can't understand why people keep getting confused by this it's very straightforward we've explained this many times yeah so like just you know if you want to

understand what you need to do is join the patreon and listen to the grometer episodes i believe there's an episode in the back catalog somewhere called Calibrating Neurometer. Go hunt that out. You'll get the concept. It's all clearly explained. And I never disagree on what the definitions of individual factors or what you should use to determine your score. So yeah, that's it.

It's all clear now. Yeah, that's good advice. Good advice. Yeah. If you don't want to get sort of verbally subtweeted on this show, called out for not understanding, pay us money. You better listen to extra content and things will be clearer. Model the definition even more in more depth.

Yeah. So another thing that has happened recently, you may have noticed, was in the discourse, there was a change of a conclusion in a report concerning the likelihood of one lab leak origin for the novel coronavirus that we've all been enjoying these past few years. And the discourse online has been very measured. People are just taking it as a piece of new information, putting it in and kind of adjusting their probabilities in a reasonable manner.

And they're not stooping into partisan blowhardery. It's been just fantastic to see that people have been so reasonable and restrained. Oh yeah. Yes. Yeah, definitely. Like Brett Weinstein definitely wasn't poised.

Like somebody about to sprint a hundred meters and then has been frantically running victory laps until he's been getting dizzy. That's the kind of thing that hasn't happened. That's what you're saying. This is sarcasm. This is sarcasm. I just, we need to flag this up on occasion. That has happened.

Everybody lost their shit. Cats and dogs living together. The sky was falling. A report from the Department of Energy in America, an organization which it's true, everyone was waiting on everybody was on tenterhooks to see, are they going to revise their conclusion or not? Because that's the domino where everything falls. And so in any case, they revised their conclusion and

they ascribed that for, they haven't actually spelled out the reasons, but it seems to be from their assessment of some intelligence sources or whatnot that they think it's more likely, right? But they put the confidence as low. So they have a low confidence conclusion that their probability is higher for the lab leak. And this has led to everyone and their muller on the internet who has been promoting the Lab League essentially declaring it fiat accompli. That's it. That's it.

You know, look, you all said it wasn't possible. Now who's laughing? The Department of Energy has made its conclusion. It's a little confident conclusion, but so what are you going to say? And anytime this happens, and this does happen, Matt, this endlessly happens. It's happened months ago whenever there was a pro-publica

vanity fair pieces. It happened a year before that whenever there was some intelligence head that made a statement when the head of the WHO makes a statement, periodically, this happens. There is an article that comes out where somebody or some organization expresses that the lab leak is a possible origin or is a likely origin. And then lab leak, Twitter, heterodox Twitter, lose their mind and just run all over the place screaming that this is it.

So what do you think of me now? Look at me now. Yeah, that's right. Look, look, they admit it. They admit it. They finally admit it. Yeah, we broke through the mainstream barrier. Now we're taking over.

So this is related to this thing that's very frustrating which you've called discourse surfing which i i really quite like as a concept and it obviously applies not just to lab like but to so many different things where instead of people paying attention to the aggregate body of evidence and expert opinion whatever that exists out there which which does change over time generally in an incremental slow kind of way that generally isn't kind of these new revelations causing all the scientists to sort of go oh my god i've completely changed my mind now but at the same time there's the discourse layer on top of that and it could be some vox article that could be a new york times article it could be a statement from some politician or some government department, whatever.

It's all the discourse and people are seemingly extremely reactive to this discourse in both directions. So they could be reacting against some article or opinion where it might have been a bit bullish on something like masks or lab leak or something like that. And then they go, now they said this and now they said this. Who do we trust? They're all lying or something. And what they seem to miss is that it's all discourse. This is all some combination of journalists and pundits

and various public figures making some public statement, it isn't the underlying body of evidence or body of credible expert opinion. Yeah. So like you could read it as the Department of Energy has relevant experts. They've got new information that has caused them to revise their assessment. And this adjusts your assessment of the likelihood. But if it's hugely swinging it, that's strange because there's been other intelligence agencies and other institutional bodies which have reached alternative conclusions, right? Which either say there's not enough evidence or judge it not likely, and there's ones that judge it likely,

right? So why this particular piece of information or why it is every month or two months when there's an article that comes out and quotes someone that you're so dramatically shifted is the thing which surprises me. Because if you're really invested in this, I feel like you should be paying attention to the research literature. And you might reach different conclusions from the research literature, but there's nothing really new that came out. And most of the scientists involved have responded to this to point that out, that there's just a low confidence conclusion shift in one American agency, but also to state quite clearly, almost all of them, if there is some smoking gun new evidence that emerges that shifts the probabilities, that they will

acknowledge that and shift their conclusions. But they haven't seen it yet. And every past occasion that this occurs, it's turned out to be much less impressive. And there is this weird weird standard whereby the very people who constantly bemoan that mainstream media narratives are, these are the things which are problematic and you can't trust government organizations. And it's all like all of those narratives, they just completely dissolve anytime an article appears that supports a heterodox alternative position. It's like none of those critiques apply, except for the most conspiratorially minded who, like Brett Weinstein, for example, noted that Sam Harris released this episode recently on the lab link with Alina Chan and and matt ridley and then he noted

that the wall street journal article came out recently and then he just pondered is there some connection like you know is sam was sam aware of this article or was there behind the scenes collusion between some shadowy elite of opinion makers who now have decided for some reason that lab leak can be given more credibility? And no, there isn't. And actually, although there has been at times heavy handed moderation, like Facebook, for example, had some thing which said, like, if you promote the lab leak as being an artificial thing, that this wasn't permitted. But as far as I can tell, pretty much all of the lab leak advocates were not kicked off Facebook.

I think the main thing that Facebook suppressed was presenting it as a buyer weapon or that kind of thing, right? Like leaning into that. But then they changed that policy over a year ago in 2021 in response to some articles coming out, right? So the notion that this topic has been taboo, I wish that were the case because if it were, I wouldn't have had to hear about it every freaking month for years now so like to me it's not covered constantly in the mainstream but there's been a steady drip of discussion on it and usually in the articles that discuss the possibility the experts have these quotes where they say things like, we cannot rule out the possibility of a lab leak entirely.

The journal articles all make these points when you read it. They say the evidence, scientific evidence for these reasons leads us to conclude that a natural origin is much more likely. However, we cannot rule out entirely the possibility of a lab leak. So it hasn't been taken off the table. It's just that the scientists, for various reasons, believe that it's unlikely. The majority of scientific evidence, the weight of evidence leans towards it not being a lab leak. And that's where they draw their assessment from so it's just it's difficult to

to handle the discourse because there's so many people who just want you to react to an article headline and this is a journalist who previously made a big thing about reports about people being sick at the wuhan institute of virology right but there's no indication yet and no being no proof, that those people were sick with COVID. Or even, I think that they were actually sick in the given timeframe. But in any organization,

people get sick in the winter. You know, you'd need to have evidence that they were sick with COVID, or COVID-like symptoms for it to be a big story. But the journalist presented it like that. So you already knew where his sympathies were. So him publishing an article, which does report things relatively accurately, but which is kind of framed as this is a big deal. It's not surprising. It's just normal. Like some journalists are quite strongly in favor of the lab leak being the most likely

possibility. Well, and in general, journalists are in favor of a good story. It's their job. I mean, people should be used to this by now. You remember when dark chocolate would cure cancer and, oh no, now dark chocolate will kill you. Maybe she'll drink one glass of red wine a day. I mean, journalists just have that tendency because it's very hard to write a story, an article, without making it out to be a bit of a big deal.

It's an unfortunate thing, but that's just how it is. I mean, one of the things we see with the lab leak is a very common complaint that they're being ostracized, that they're being labeled you know, labeled conspiracists for merely wanting to discuss the possibility that such a thing might be the case. Where, as you said, this is simply not true. It's discussed and has been discussed extremely seriously in the scientific literature. So two things can be true, right? On one hand, it can be less likely on the basis of evidence

that lab leak occurred. It can be reasonable to still put forward, you know, to marshal the evidence for that position and explain the reasons why you're doing it. At the same time, there can be and were very lurid conspiracy theories circulating around bioweapons and sort of crazy stuff or even stuff which may not be crazy, but it is a conspiracy theory. Just recently, we've heard Alina Chan and Matt Ridley talk about this conspiracy of silence around researchers, not just the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but international virologists everywhere. We're going to talk about the origins of COVID,

but in the background, and perhaps explicitly, we're also talking about the political corruption of science and a fundamental lack of transparency on the part of public health officials and, you know, attendant failures of cooperation. When I first started wondering about where this pandemic had come from, I had no idea about this whole history of collaboration between not just the US, but many other countries across Asia and Europe with labs in China to do quite risky virus work that might have led to this pandemic. So here, it's not just whether Western scientists are afraid of provoking China. it's not just whether Western scientists are afraid of provoking China. It's really a question of, are they also complicit in the origin of COVID-19? And over the last few years, we've seen again and again,

a lot of support within the US for exactly that type of dangerous virus research that's commonly known now as gain-of-function research. So if the pandemic did start from a lab in Wuhan, it is not just a Chinese government issue. It is actually an issue that affects multiple countries, many countries who have all supported and endorsed and engaged in this work. And the US is a big funder of it. So they would have almost equal responsibility, I think, in my eyes. It is a case that Western virology feels worried that its entire research program, indeed the whole of biotechnology, might lose its funding, might lose its social license, if a major accident is revealed to have happened as a result of work in a laboratory. I mean, whether or not you agree with them, they are alleging a conspiracy and they are basically pointing at that conspiracy for why there is a lack of evidence for their position.

So it seems a bit difficult for people to imagine. Yep, you have people like Brett Weinstein getting on his high horse and demanding an apology for being called a conspiracy theorist because now this government organization has changed their assessment to being having a low level of certainty that they think it's more likely that it was a lab leak even though there are like four other u.s government organizations which have the opposite point of view still yeah and then so like a point that's possibly worth emphasizing is that it is possible for people to draw different conclusions about the relative likelihoods right there will always be a distribution of opinions on any given topic within a field.

And you will have some people that have outlier views and may hold them for good reasons or bad reasons or consensus positions can be wrong. They have been in the past. All of this is true. But it is also true that there is a conspiracy ecosystem which exists online and which grows up around topics like these and the lab leak is no exception there are people in that community that behave exactly like 9-11 troopers exactly like climate skeptics there are genuine parallels with the lab leak online community. You can see it in the tactics that they use, which are things like anomaly hunting, like focusing on out of context snippets of emails and presenting the scientists involved as

nefarious, arrogant elitists who are trying to manipulate the public. And they're just interested in securing research grants. And they've been arrogantly playing God. And now they're being captured, like the kind of very stereotypical conspiracy image. And you also do see this thing about researchers being smeared, having their home addresses and whatnot being doxxed, family members targeted, and then becoming partisan targets. Now, if you think that they are doing all of these things that are alleged, they're covering up the origins of the virus and they are colluding with the Chinese state to suppress important information, then they are seen as fair game, right? Because they're morally corrupt and bringing these villains to light is justified, right? But it should be clear that that is the image that

has constantly been presented about climate researchers, about 9-11 investigations, the engineers, right? That's the way that they're presented. Yeah. About the people creating the vaccines as well. That's the way that they're presented. Yeah, about the people creating the vaccines as well. Yeah, yeah. And so that does not mean that any discussion of the lab leak falls into the category of lurid conspiracism. But that is a component of that whole ecosystem.

And it is very often the case that you see people not distinguish between the two and repeating the rhetoric of the more hardcore conspiratorial members of the lab leak community. And I understand it's like, it is a tricky thing to navigate, but what would be useful if you had an interest in the topic is to, yes, no problem to listen to the experts respond to that. Go and listen to them in long form content, outline why they hold the views that they do. Or if you're capable of it, read the summary papers that are published attempting to summarize the evidence because that gives you the counter opinion.

And that is why there is, I think, such a large delta between public perception and the general expert opinion, because the experts are basing their position largely on the scientific evidence and the public is not. It's all this discourse. It's this maelstrom. And if it turns out that there has been this cover-up and the chinese government engaged in all these nefarious actions i guarantee that the people that uncover it will be people doing careful investigatory reporting it will not be the discourse surfing conspiracy prone people no it won't be pundits taking hot shots on social media so look it absolutely is challenging it's just human nature i think to

focus your attention on whatever the newest news article or public statement is and you can quite easily slip into the view that there's corresponding dramatic moves or flip-flopping in the underlying scientific consensus or evidence base, when actually it mayrologists, we're not experts in these things. We rely sensibly on somebody else to synthesize that evidence for us. That's the right thing to do. But that makes us quite vulnerable to being influenced by whatever the latest thing is that's coming along and be more influenced by people who are, for instance, a science journalist writing a popular book rather than the more boring, less accessible opinions that are often buried in research labs or whatever. So, the final thing that makes it hard for us all is we've got this confirmation bias. The very same people who would totally dismiss some statement made by a government

organization, especially when they don't show their evidence. It's all confidential. They don't explain any of their working. They just come up with a pronouncement. They would totally dismiss that if that organization was saying something like, I don't know, masks are really important. You have to wear them, right, as untrustworthy because it's the government

and because they haven't shown the evidence or whatever. so there's that very selective skepticism that comes into play so me and chris you could tell from listening to us that we're dummies as well with these things but it's just good to ask yourself questions when these things come along like how much has the evidence base or consensus expert opinion changed as a result of this new thing that's come along? Is it really a smoking gun or is it just another little thing to add on the pile of existing evidence? Where do my own kind of sympathies lie? Am I more likely to believe statements that go in one direction rather than the other so yeah it's kind of like folk epistemology right it's just people trying to have good opinions or have accurate opinions about how

the world works and it's not particularly easy but uh that's what we gotta do yeah like the one point that i will finish on that that i think is true is that i do think at times researchers do not do themselves favours by being more transparent about things, how they reach decision or whatever. And I think the public health authorities did the same thing. I understand the reasoning why they made the decisions that they did, but I think they backfire because they don't explain. So like in some cases of researchers that said,

look, I thought initially that the virus was lab made because it has these features. But I changed my opinion because of X, Y, and Z, right? Then I think that would be more well-received than people like more sticking to the final conclusion and not trying to introduce doubt but i understand why they don't do that but i think that would have helped yeah look on a very similar note i think in in hindsight some people have suggested that it would be have been better for public health authorities when they're giving public health advisories in relation to something like COVID to always have

that disclaimer, which is that this is our best guess based on limited information in a fast evolving situation, whatever. And I appreciate on one hand, the perceived imperative to keep public health messaging simple and direct and not introducing uncertainty. That's just what you need to do when you are giving public advice. But when you're not sure, when the evidence is unclear, we're seeing how it can contribute to increased public distrust of science and public health authorities because it's perceived as lying, as flipflopping etc so uh so yeah i agree with you yeah so the topic will come up again endlessly i anticipate but just to say there is an option where whatever conclusion that you reach on the various likelihood, and I genuinely mean it when I say

that I think for the vast majority of us, whatever assessment is, is completely irrelevant because we lack the expertise to properly assess things, right? So like what most people on Twitter think is the most likely is it doesn't matter. Like what I think, it doesn't matter, right? What matters is people who understand the evidence and where they draw the probabilities and the general way of evidence. But also with that, that, you know, if you want to be very invested in this

and you think it's important for whatever reasons, just try not to be reactive to every new headline that comes out, whether it supports your position or whether it contradicts it. Take the cumulative perspective. Overall, how much evidence is there? What does this new piece of evidence adjust or not adjust and that's the thing which so few people seem to be doing they're just like ping-ponging between headlines and currently there's a bunch of headlines saying lab leak is likely and so

there's a big thing right well now they're admitting the lab leak is likely there will likely be a bunch of other headlines in a second wave in a while, which says, actually, this was oversold and the thing remains unlikely. These things come in waves and it'll be a reaction to those headlines and so on. And that's what I'm talking about discourse surfing. Underlying that, all that's happened is a organization changed a low confidence conclusion in a report and the you'd be better waiting on just more papers coming out more investigations like proper investigations not partisan political ones and yeah that's that's it we've said a lot about it

but um you know it just it comes up so frequently and it's going to continue coming up there will be another article and headlines in another six months time and the same thing will happen again yeah no no i think it's i think it's a good thing anything that's helpful for making us a little bit less vulnerable to punditry is a good thing and on brand for decoding the gurus and you know what is also on brand for decoding the gurus and you know what is also on brand for decoding the gurus chris decoding oh yeah decoding dave rubin dave rubin is it well yeah it's it is true we often deal with annoying people so in that in that regards he's on brand so dave rubin is a kind of talk show host for an online show called the rubin report there's a a profile on quillette called all about dave that came out

just before christ by Ross Anderson. And it's this very detailed breakdown of his career and the trajectory, right? So if you want the background knowledge, I would suggest reading that. But the very condensed version is he was a comic of sorts, a wannabe comic, got some positions hosting media shows and alternative media talk shows and he was with the young turks at some point a fairly left-wing outlet and then he left that created his own rubin report channel which set itself out branded itself as neither right nor left, just looking at issues with nuance and not polemical, giving people proper breakdowns. And that pretense, it lasted for a little while, but very quickly became clear that Dave Rubin is a right-wing partisan

and not really capable of offering pushback to any of the people that he interviews. So he's now full-on, as you'll see, a kind of right-wing MAGA, conspiracist type, and feuding with various people that he used to champion, like notably Sam Harris or that kind of person. Yeah, these people are interesting. Conspiracy type and feuding with various people that they use the champion, like notably Sam Harris or that kind of person. Yeah, these people are interesting. He, like many, started off as a comedian, stand-up comedy, that kind of thing. And he has gotten more partisan, right?

So early on, he hosted LGBT-themed shows, I see i see yeah as you said was on the young turks i probably at that point in his career i haven't listened to his earlier stuff but i kind of assumed that he hadn't really made his mind up to be a hardcore partisan pundit but clearly perhaps has followed the lure of attention i guess it seems to be his brand now yeah so probably the easiest thing to do is just to demonstrate by playing clips where dave rubin currently is and there's two pieces of content that we looked at for this episode one is his interview with bill maher on club random which we'll we'll get to in the tail end of the decoding segment but the first is just a randomly selected rubin report episode this one is from uh when is it from well Well, it doesn't matter, really, because they're all essentially the same. But I think this is from a month or two months ago. And it was focused on Greta Thunberg,

her appearance at a conference or this kind of thing. And you'll get to hear what that's like. Today's show, as we begin the week, is going to be an extension of sort of what we were doing last week, which is a lot of stuff about the World Economic Forum and how its tentacles have basically reached into every Western democracy and have us all doing a whole bunch of stuff that's probably against our national interest. But for some reason, we feel the need. Well, not you, not me, but the collective we, to listen to these lunatics like Screaming Al Gore and absolutely awful John Kerry or very bizarre, angry little girl Greta Thunberg, etc., etc. The cast of characters does not end. But we're going to go into a bit more about what's going on over at the WEF, which we think it just wrapped up. It just wrapped up.

They're probably still sucking the natural resources out of the area and worshipping children or whatever they do. But yeah, the thing itself wrapped up. So we're going to cover a little bit of the end of it, some of the media reaction to it, and then how that's sort of reflective of everything going on in our country right here. Yep, so he's spelling out the kind of stuff he's concerned about And then how that's sort of reflective of everything going on in our country right here. Yep. So he's spelling out the kind of stuff he's concerned about with the World Economic Forum.

Yeah. So it was Greta Thunberg's attendance at the World Economic Forum, right? And you can hear from that clip, his delivery is like a kind of classical talk show host, right? His elocution is quite good, but he's delivering just hardcore, almost talk radio era conspiracism, right? It's that flavor of conspiracism, but with the modern anti-war talking point,

like the modern right enemy is the world economic forum they're trying to enslave us and take away national sovereignty but it's all very familiar themes right it's like the the globalists taking over and liberals being the the kind of sock puppets in order to restrict national sovereignty and and take away like what's true and good about the american spirit yeah yeah it's basically the same themes that someone like alex jones would be dealing with but definitely as you say delivered in a different tone and yeah you could substitute some of those topics like you could talk about satan and feminism and communism and you could make it like radio talk show from the midwest in the 1980s yeah and greta thunberg is a figure who draws a lot of attention from the right-wing

media system both alternative and mainstream you might even say that there's something of a thunberg delusion in effect in the way that they cover her with like so much attention. But yeah, here's Dave Rubin talking about her. So first, let's start with Greta Thunberg. And you know Greta Thunberg. How dare you? This little girl who screams about climate change and who's aging horribly because her whole life is based on nonsense. and who's aging horribly because her whole life is based on nonsense.

Anyway, we played last week her being arrested in Germany. And there was a clip that went viral around the world, was seen millions and millions of times of her being arrested, protesting something in Germany, mean German police officers carrying her away. It was very scary. Of course, then we found the other video and the other video shows that the entire thing was staged, completely staged, her smiling with the police officers beforehand, literally them like softly holding her on the wrist, just completely ridiculous. That's a very clear parallel with like the alex jones kind of coverage right that it's all a fake flag she

wasn't arrested it was staged and you know and just the random shots about like she's aging horribly yeah yeah that seemed um yeah i was a bit surprised to hear that one but yeah yeah so you know it just it it is that kind of narrative and there's like a visceral hatred but it's really she's just an avatar for like opposition towards climate change mitigation right yeah it's interesting how right-wing pundits often do this like the like characters like i mean maybe the left does it too, but I'm thinking like characters like Fauci or Greta Thunberg, they become, like you say, avatars of love everything that they hate. Like the attention really does focus on individual people.

I mean, I don't know. I really do hate Rupert Murdoch, so maybe it's true of everyone. I don't know. Yeah, but I think it does happen on both sides of the aisle. You know, maybe just tendency of people to personify things like that, systems or approaches. But there is this, like, you know, if you're talking about the level of attention that, like, say, a Trump or a Marjorie taylor green gets right like greta

tunberg is up there in the pantheon of liberal hate figures but it's it yeah on the one hand it's somewhat surprising because the left also i think deserve some of the responsibility for this because they did give a large spotlight to her when she emerged. So in some way, that drew the ire. But again, she was like a young kid speaking forcefully about climate change. So there was a novelty aspect to it and the aspect that she was quite morally outraged that her generation is the one that will bear the brunt of the costs and and she's been very effective as a campaigner in terms of getting attention onto the issue and having like significant profile yeah it's interesting how that climate change debate evolved like i remember when the debate was very much quite dry

on the pro-climate action side. It was very dry. It was very scientific. It was very logical. Here's all the evidence, statistics and graphs and that kind of thing. And the response to it was very emotional. You had the talkback radio people and it was very hyperbolic very very over the top they're all lying to us it's this this is terrible left-wing plot and they're going to destroy the economy all those things so probably greta thunberg marks a kind of a transition point where the advocates for climate action I think probably just out of frustration, not really getting anywhere with the dry, rational approach, started taking a more passionate, emotional approach as well. Yeah, I mean, I think that has always existed to some extent, right? Like, I think things like Extinction Rebellion and the profile roles of the more hardcore activist side against climate

change but i mean i i remember there were still climate protesters and environmentalist protesters that's always been an element like you know pita and stuff like that have various companions which which cause a lot of people to say that it's counterproductive for that kind of thing so yeah but in terms of the stuff that took center stage they always existed certainly yeah but maybe it's a contrast between like Al Gore

and Greta Thunberg right yeah their presentation because Al Gore was more the TED talk style here's the graphs and that kind of thing. I don't know. I haven't consumed Greta's content. I haven't either.

I don't know if she does that. I've never. Yeah, the only time I ever hear about Greta Thunberg is when the right are vilifying her. Yeah, so I've only seen the clips I suspect everyone has seen of her giving a speech at the UN or wherever it was. It's amazing.

In any case, this is an aspect of the modern media that the figures which are reviled get a lot of coverage, be it on the right and the left. There it is. But Greta Thunberg was, as you would imagine would be the case, was confronted by various right-wing media outlets

when she was over at the WEF. And in particular, one far-right outlet from Canada, Rebel Media, managed to bump up to her in the street. And Dave Rubin, Alex Jones, all of the right wing pundits here were quite excited at this prospect about confronting her and seeing how she responds. So let's just listen a little bit to the way this is framed. Listen a little bit to the way this is for you. Greta ends up at the World Economic Forum, and she got questioned by some real journalists. And I have to say, when I can say the word journalist or journalists without air quotes, it's an absolute pleasure.

And I've given them a lot of credit, but I want to continue. The guys over at Rebel Media up in Canada, it is an independent outlet, I believe, started by Ezra Levant, who's a buddy of mine who's been on the show many times. They've got Avi Yemeni and a whole bunch of other people who are out there doing actual journalism at the World Economic Forum. They are running down the street, getting microphones in these people's faces, asking them real questions. Anyway, Ezra got in the face of how dare you greta thunberg and asked her about her staged arrest okay so you like the delivery matt it's so freaking i hate this style of delivery like that kind of you know dramatic polemical it's not even satirical i refuse to like honor it with that it's just this overly dramatic hand-rigging partisanship tucker carson does it too

emphatically emphasizing specific words and speaking with such disdain about the Gret. It's cartoonish. Yeah, a lot of venom infused into pretty much every word he says during this episode. Yeah. And so you heard him talk about how they are real journalists. He doesn't even like to talk about journalists

anymore, but at least this group are real journalists. So let's hear what the real journalism sounds like you're arrested the german coal mine how many times did you rehearse it because it looks staged is it true how many times did you rehearse your arrest greta how many times did you film your arrest and why was it staged that way? Greta, considering you've not spent much time in school, how do you know so much about climate change? Do you think at least the fact these delegates take private jets is a bad thing against, you know, what you believe in? All of this could be done via Zoom.

So surely, surely you should be encouraging all the delegates here, especially the likes of U.S. Special Envoy John Kerry for climate, Special Envoy for climate change. Surely you should be saying to these people, you should be doing this via Zoom with a much smaller carbon footprint, surely? Greta, would you say you're a child actor? Are you a child actor or an expert? How would you describe yourself? It's just great stuff from Rebel. And I know it's like jarring when you see a journalist going after the people who they should go after and asking the right questions. You almost don't know what to do with it because of course that's not going to come from anyone at the New York

Times or CNN or anything else. Yeah, that's just like Ruben's's little you know framing of it as great that was excellent those absolutely loaded stupid gotcha polemical gotcha style questions which she quite rightly just ignores and walks on and ruben's like that is that's fantastic isn't it you know just yeah yeah no it just illustrates just he's such a rampant partisan like there's just he he blows the lid off that scale yeah anything which is sticking it to the left is fantastic by definition um yeah yeah and he's it's just such such a little slimy sycophant as well in the way that you know he talks about any of the people that he admires versus the terrible people on the other side who are just soulless people they are and yeah and and like the specific criticisms they're leveling there at greta i believe she's rather infamous for trying to avoid flying on planes and that kind of stuff so

that line of attack is just it's just stupid right obviously she can't control how people arrive at a conference and all that kind of thing. And just, oh, so in any case, we get to hear after that, Dave Rubin kind of talk a little bit more about the climate change issue. So why couldn't she just say, actually, you know what? I will answer that one question. That's actually a decent point. And perhaps next year we'll do it by Zoom. Or perhaps next year we'll figure out some other way to have a series of flights instead of everyone flying in privately. But it's all part of the grift. So let's continue

with the grift, because it's the greatest grift of all time that they are trying to pull off. These are people who enjoy all of the luxuries of living in Western society, right? They have free speech. They have freedom of association. They have all made most of the people there millions and millions, or in Al Gore's case, hundreds of millions. John Kerry's case, hundreds of millions of dollars through capitalism, through all of the things that they've done in these free societies. Yet they have this meeting annually in Davos to discuss how they can destroy capitalism,

how they can destroy free speech, Western societies, free thought, all of that stuff. Destroy capitalism, destroy Western societies, and destroy free thought. I mean, not many people like the Davos conference, right? Across the political spectrum or the ultra rich influences important people that attend so it's understandable that the right generally and dave rubin in particular would be fixated on that because it is it is a good point like it's crats and the doable politicians yeah it's it's replete with gotchas. But the sort of layering to it that they're out to destroy the West and everything we hold dear, I mean, is just silly.

I mean, it does show that, yeah, as you say, he's willing to go pretty deep into conspiracism to further his partisanship. Yeah, and that, you know know dichotomy between environmentalism being just parasitic on capitalism and you know the societies it just for me it had echoes of constantine kissens speech that if you you live in a modern society and you enjoy plumbing and those kinds of things. You want to prevent other societies from developing because climate or environmental protection, it has to be prioritized.

But it's creating that dichotomy that the people at Davos in general, the notion that they would want to destroy capitalism and western democracies when they themselves are many of the beneficiaries of those exact systems like yeah it's just it's yeah i know it's silly it doesn't even make sense does it i mean well you know we talked about the parallels with alex jones and the kind of populist right isolationist kind of perspective and the kind of sentiment that you find on talk radio amongst militias in the past you can hear it in a lot of dave rubin's speech and this is him for example commenting on some remarks by a Slovenian foreign minister who's talking about the war in Ukraine. But listen to what they say, what Riles did the wrong way.

Here is Slovenian foreign minister Tanja Fijon, I think I got that one right, calling for countries to really stop caring about themselves and bow to the new world order. We have to take care of the rules of the international law and really respect that and not change it in a time when there are countries that choose the way not to respect them. And Russia choose that way. So we have countries that are respecting the rules and we have countries that are respecting their national interests going beyond the rules. And that is what is happening. And we have to take into consideration the world order. That's a really extraordinary statement for a foreign minister of any country to be saying

you're respecting the rules. If you're respecting the World Economic Forum's rules. They are not some sort of binding organization, completely not. They're a group of rich elites who send out their minions to all of our countries to try to change our policies, but they don't set rules. They'd like to set rules. They'd like to set far more than rules, and they'd like to take a whole bunch of us out while they do it. But she seems to think that their rules are more important than the country's own national interest. Well, frankly, Slovenia lady, I think that Slovenians should be in charge of what happens in Slovenia. Okay. I think that's a pretty Slovenian idea. And I think Americans should be more in charge of what's going on with Americans than a Slovenian foreign minister

and her sold out cadre of lizard people. Okay. That's where I sit on this thing. Shocking. Shocking. That's a real turn up for the books. Dave Rubin is against global initiatives, Rubin is against global initiatives, multilateral agreements. He's for nationalism, basically individual national countries looking after their own stuff in isolation. Yeah. I know, I know, but it's just, it's such bad fear framing as well, because she didn't mention anything about the WEF's rules. She talked about the international rules of law. That's the international order that kind of, you're not allowed to invade another country.

She explicitly mentioned Russia pursuing its own national interests at the expense of other countries. And Dave Rubin and his cadre, like their no nothing approach, your national interests become an international issue when another country invades you, right? And that's what she was talking about, like upholding the world order, which the US is a proponent of, right? Like a key advocate for that. And they themselves have also, don't get me wrong, like historically, they have not heeded the rules of international. But that's all that's being said. But that's all that's being said.

And he treats it as the lizard people are trying to take over America and Slovenia and say, you can't have national interest. No, like your national interests include joining alliances so that you are able to not be invaded by hostile neighbors. Yeah. And your national interests include not having your low-lying areas being submerged as a result of pollution that was put out by other countries, right? Yeah. It's an interconnected world. Yeah, look, this is all obvious.

We don't need to spell this out to people. Everyone knows this. But it's, as you said, it's that know-nothing isolationism that's been a thread, especially in u.s political discourse since at least the 1920s and 30s i think and yeah so dave rubin he he's really i mean the thing that surprised me about listening to dave rubin chris because i didn't listen to hardly anything of his before is that i i knew he was a partisan pundit but i i didn't realize how stupid or at what a low primitive kind of level his punditry was operating at. Yeah, I mean, it really is creeping the barrel. And you heard him mention lizard people offhandedly at the end, kind of jokingly, but like, listen to this clip.

But they continued because not only are they trying to confuse you about climate change and they want to make sure you follow their rules. Well, they've also got to make everything gay. Okay. They have to gay up the whole thing. Hold on. Let me loosen my wrist a little. They have to make this whole thing gay. Okay. You have to be gay. And if you're not gay, they'll gay you up. They'll put it in the water, whatever they have to do. They're going to gay it up. We have to get this gay stuff out there. Video. It's about making sure that people are seen in the mainstream media in day to day life. And I think that's another opportunity where we have the corporate world to play a really

important role. It's in there, as one of our colleagues said in another forum that we were in the other day, the hearts and minds part of this. And that is to make LGBT people, the community visible when you are talking about your product, you know, visible in your imagery. You know, we can make sure that your products are centered towards does anyone think we need more of this are you guys not getting enough gay imagery throughout the day uh look i think many people might reasonably roll their eyes a little bit at the sort of corporate corporations you know representation and etc like you Like, you know, it's fine. They're obviously not trying to turn the frogs gay.

Put things in the water to turn people gay. But I think the only interesting thing about Dave Rubin that I really spotted was that is the fact that he is gay himself. I think he and his partner may have a child. Yeah, they had surrogates, so I think they had two kids. And one thing, as we'll hear, I'm a bit sympathetic to him too, which I really shouldn't be because he puts himself in these positions, which is the kind of strange obsession that many fellow right-wing or heterodox people have with his sexuality but it is he

occupies an odd role doesn't he because he definitely i don't know his homosexuality it doesn't fit particularly well with him being a rabid right-wing conspiratorial partisan and yet it somehow plays a role in his in his discourse right yeah there's a little bit where it's almost like he has to be you know performatively critical of that whole space and in a way that avoids the potential i think for people to make that a point of criticism like there was a there's a rather famous clip where one of the people that he had on the show afterwards discovered that he was gay, like a hard right commentator, who then you know, fiend mock outrage and said, Oh

my god, he touched my hand. Stephen said, they hate Dave Rubin because he's a gay man with the wrong. Dave Rubin is gay. No. He got a husband? I did not know. I was in his presence. I didn't know. I shook his hand. Ah.

I sat down with him. Why would y'all tell? Why didn't y'all tell me before I went on the show? Oh. Steven, why would you send me this? Oh my God, Stephen, you've ruined my day. And there's an element of that, which is genuinely just depressingly lacking in self-respect. You know, Dave Rubin talked to someone who was discussing the surrogacy like when he announced his surrogate plans to have children via surrogacy it was not greeted warmly on the

right side of the aisle yeah i saw that a few times but the other thing is like the reference to the turning the frogs gay putting stuff in the water lizard people. It's all done as a kind of, in a jokey tone, right? It's not done with the same seriousness that you would find Alex Jones. But Alex Jones also deploys a jokey tone at times when he needs to. It just depends on the audience as to how he refers those things but i feel like dave rubin is getting away with essentially calling people lizard people and saying they're putting things in the water but because he does it in a jokey tone he can make use of all of those tropes he can half-heartedly endorse them all but he always has this layer of deniability where you can say well

no i wasn't you know i didn't mean they're actually lizard people or that kind of thing yeah look absolutely and there's this rich history of that kind of thing with you know 4chan-ish ironic stance where they're they're always joking just trying to trigger liberals by saying outrageous things, just joking, not really, ha-ha, aren't you confused now? Now, you know, I guess we've got to mention, though, that that's extraordinarily common, though. That ironic stance is something that even the best of us, Chris, might use on Twitter from time to time because it is rhetorically convenient. So it's just worth noticing.

Well, yeah, it is, butically convenient so it's just worth noticing yeah well yeah it is but i think there's a difference between adopting you know irony to soften a particular perspective that you want to promote and taking the most hardcore conspiratorial tropes and dropping them into your content when you have an audience which is conspiratorially leaning and especially when in the next breath or a previous breath he's saying the wf is sending its tentacles out and its minions to take us all out and so on like he's not joking there so when you're mixing up jokes and scare quotes about gay frogs and lizard people in that context yeah it's very different yeah so it will not surprise you to hear i think that ruben alongside all of the standard punditry and whatnot he also

will frequently reference other right-wing figures we already heard him endorse the rebel media, Ezra Levant. And here's him talking a little bit about Tucker and also vaccines coming here. Vaccines and globalists, Matt. So lots to enjoy. Just stay out of our lives. That is it, crazy hat lady. Tucker had a nice little take on the ending of the World Economic Forum. They brought in some entertainers at the end, and there was this incredible flautist.

She was a flautist without a flout. Take a look. Time to check in with our lizard overlords in Davos, Switzerland. What are they up to? Those people run the world, question mark. I think, look, it all seems scary and they are plotting against us. I mean, they really are. And they do send these stooges like Justin Trudeau and Gavin Newsom. They send these people into Western democracies. But I'm telling you guys, I really, really believe this. This is not the best of the best that we're up against. These are incompetent buffoons

whose ideas are so anti-human that they cannot win. We just need to be a little bit braver pushing back on them. We just need to expose them more. And that's why they want censorship, of course. But a lot of the stuff that they have pushed over the last couple of years is being exposed in real time. And good people, not crazy right-wing maniacs, good, decent people who are apolitical, who just want to go about living their lives. They're figuring it out. So this is really extraordinary. You may remember a video that we played last week where Ezra Levant and Avi Yemeni, two of the rebel news guys, where they got at Davos, they got in the face of Albert Bourla,

and he is the Pfizer CEO. And they asked him about the efficacy of vaccines and when did he know they didn't work and why are they continuing to push it, et cetera, et cetera. All these clips, I think illustrate how far Dave Rubin goes. I certainly wasn't aware that he was operating like at this level of paranoid conspiracism. aware that he was operating like at this level of paranoid conspiracism um yeah justin trudeau and gavin newsom are like the emissaries from the world economic forum who've been sent in they're just the puppets it's very much alex jones presentation of how politics function and that. And also just that line about not crazy right-wing people, just decent apolitical people. It was the apolitical bit that got me.

Yeah, they're so apolitical. And that reference that comes at the end where he's talking about Ezra Levant and Rebel News cornering the CEO of Pfizer. When did they find out the vaccines don't work and why are they continuing to promote it and stuff? And it's just, yeah, no, it's very, it's bad. It's very bad. It's highlighting how deep the anti-vaccine stuff is on the right now. And, and just to illustrate that more. So what else is going on here? Well, the other piece of

that comes with all of this is that we are learning every day more and more that the vaccines did not work, that they lied about the science, that they push things on people who did not need vaccines, whether they were, you know, healthy 25-year-old guys who otherwise were not going to get sick, maybe would get sick a little bit, but then move on like everything else is happening in the world. You get the flu, you move on. Okay, life's fine. But they wanted to vaccinate children, all of these things. And now we're seeing all of this stuff about vaccine injuries and the heart attacks and people passing out and a whole bunch more. And they can't honestly answer those questions, right? Because they'd all end up in jail probably if they honestly answered it. So the grift, all of the people, all of the people, whether it's the people at

Pfizer or the people at the government or people in the WEF or Hollywood actors, all of the people who push mandates, who push vaccines, they had no idea what they were talking about or they were doing it for genuinely nefarious reasons. They all have to protect each other because if one guy admits it, then it's dominoes, right? You're going to take out everybody. One of the fascinating things about all of this is that, did you know, you probably did because you're a pretty bright person, that Pfizer wanted immunity from vaccine lawsuits and basically got granted it by our government. Here's Tucker talking about that. Oh, yeah. I mean, I was talking to some normal person who was a bit confused that the anti-vax narrative stuff has really, if anything, stepped up in intensity most recently, as opposed to whatever, a year or two ago. And they said to me, like, why is that?

Because, you know, everyone who's going to be vaccinated has been vaccinated by now. There aren't many intrusive public health measures going on. It's kind of most people are basically moving on with their lives. And it made me realize, and this clip illustrates it well, how it serves as a point of grievance. It's now entering right-wing law as something to feel extremely aggrieved about, yet another thing that you were lied about, that you were tricked by whatever the elites, the globalists trying to exert coercive control over you. So it's interesting how it functions.

Yeah, and I actually think it ties into the discussion we had at the start about the lab leak in terms of you see it presented as they're all lying. We found out none of it was true. The media, the politicians, the celebrities, all of them were pushing this lie on us. And now the dominoes are falling and we've been proven right. And now you see that rhetoric, it's the exact same around the lablet, the reaction amongst the same people, Dave Rubin and co, right? This is where you can see the parallels in the rhetoric being used and why you should be suspicious about those kinds of claims, right? Like it is interesting because the facts do not support any of this. The vaccines did work. They've been extremely effective. Most people have been vaccinated now. Public health measures have been relaxed in almost all countries. And this isn't what they said was going to happen. They said it was going to be perpetual lockdowns. This was just

the beginning and that these were the authoritarian steps to get people in line before the takeover. And yeah, it ties into the pre-existing rhetoric, the kind of globalists plan to take over really neatly. It's just the newest flavor of that but actually nothing has changed this is the same narrative that you would have seen in infowars 20 years ago around vaccines and that's why when people are saying oh you know it's not about anti-vaccines it's about these vaccines and all that kind of thing no it's not this is the same rhetoric it's just becoming more mainstream yeah on the right yeah and it's not even specifically about vaccines even in general like you could substitute say gun controls or something what books are in school

libraries whatever every little issue can just be slotted quite neatly into that broader worldview which is you know we all know its features it's conspiratorial it's it's anti-globalist it's nationalist it's anti-government it's a whole bunch of things but yeah you know it's emotive and somewhat dangerous stuff and yeah i just hadn't realized how far dave rubin had gone i mean we're not really in this to be political commentators but man the hard right is knocking farts man like like like dave rubin says he's a moderate or apolitical or whatever but if you take his claim as true that he's like a liberal center of right classical liberal person like man that's insane the center right is fucking crazy so yeah and again just sticking on the anti-vaccine point for

a little bit longer here's him discussing vaccine advertisements and pharmaceutical industry so on so forth they're gonna you take a pill it's's going to somehow fix that, but you're going to get hysterical diarrhea and thoughts of suicide and vomiting, and you're going to punch your grandmother, a whole bunch of wacky shit. But for some reason with the Pfizer, I think, did I make up the punch your grandma thing? All right, I might've made that one up. But for some reason with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, they push these commercials everywhere and they never said anything about side effects. How bizarre. It is quite bizarre. But it wasn't just, you can't blame just the drug companies

for this. You can't just blame Pfizer and Moderna because they need cohorts. They need a partner to pull a scam like this on everybody. We found this video. What they need are government actors who will scare the hell out of people so that the government can make contracts with these big pharma companies and they can pull the giant grift of all time right in front of our eyes. Check this video out. This is the Australian government. This is not Pfizer. It's going to play a clip about like trying to encourage people to get vaccinated and yeah but the australian government matt your repressive state is being called out there yeah yep evil regime that it is yeah he plays out a clip it's mainly a video clip there's no

dialogue in it and it's just i think it's probably showing someone in intensive care struggling to breathe because of they've got the acute infection of COVID, right? Yeah. That's a safe assumption. Yeah, it's just interesting the things that trigger them. The Australian government, this is a bit of a tangent, but back in the day when AIDS was a big issue, there was a public health campaign to get people to practice safe sex. And it was a little bit controversial because they had like the grim reaper they had the grim reaper involved and it was a similar

kind of thing just showing people yeah you know just using emotive visual techniques to raise awareness i'm okay with that they had a similar kind of campaign with like dangerous driving drinking and driving that kind of had a similar kind of campaign with like dangerous driving, drinking and driving, that kind of thing, showing the aftermath of an accident. Yeah, I think that's all. Yeah. You know, the amount of double standards which slam into you whenever you are dealing with partisan content is just,

you become desensitized to it. Because Rubin has been cheering on the most unhinged, polemical, gotcha journalism style. And then a government video trying to use emotion to get people aware of risks. That's beyond the PL. But his lurid fantasies about the globalist sneaking into your bed at night to cut your throat that's all fair game and it's just uh i just you know you become desensitized to it as you listen to more of it but it's it's just striking all of his claims are false

that the vaccines don't mention anything about side effects. I don't know about you, Chris. I had a pretty fair idea of the side effects that I would get even before I got the vaccine. So it's lies. It's just outright lies. It's like it works. It works. And that's just the thing that's amazing about it.

So, you know. I think we live in an age of crowdsourced propaganda. This is the world we live in now. People like Dave Rubin are creating it, you know, purely on their own initiative and on their own bat and presumably profiting, making a good living from doing it. He's quite rich, I got the impression. And so there's no sort of government apparatus,

ministry of information that's generating the lies. But yeah, in the modern era, we're just seeing like we've outsourced it, we've crowdsourced it. It's now the domain of free enterprise, people like Dave Rubin to just lie constantly. Yeah. And if you want to hear an example of him lying, being a propagandist, being a partisan polemicist, and this is Dave Rubin at his best, like attempting to be, you know, a kind of right wing rhetorician or like a powerful orator. This is his best shot. We're showing you all this because we're actually winning and they're losing. And it's not just because some of them are resigning. And it's not just because more and more people are waking up to the nonsense and people are realizing what outsourcing your individual

choice does to society. It's that people are, generally speaking, fighting the system in a new way. They really, really are. People are tuning out of mainstream media. They're tuning into shows like this. And we can do it. And then people get braver, right? That's the thing that I'm always talking about, that bravery begets bravery. So Ezra Levant, he's going out there.

He's being brave. Now that video has been seen 20 million times. And he'll get braver. And then you know what? Some people will donate to rebel and their operation will expand. And yes, and the government of Canada will try to shut down their bank accounts and a whole bunch more. But it's like the march is on guys. It really is gone. But what do I always say about all of this? The simple truth is we cannot forget the hysteria. There's a reason I'm showing you that Australian government video yeah matt the the brief people tuning into this guff and i'm donating you know the important thing it's like

it's always the fucking message of alex jones as well the fight is on we are fighting back with the good people with the real people by bone broth to support info wars and i'll continue fighting right deep rubin ezra levant they're all just siphons for credulous fools if you're supporting deep rubin god god damn it man but you didn't mention donald trump who's flagrant grifting who's just amazing especially after he lost office or every evangelist radio preacher in the united states every sermon ends with that donate to save your soul yeah it's pretty it's pretty blatant but it is you know you can see part of the emotional hit there it's um he's not even good at it though is he no i mean well it's not working on me but you have to try to put yourself in the position of his audience i suppose but i'm thinking

about in terms of delivery like jordan peterson whatever you think about him he can give a passionate speech right where he's he's making it almost too passionate chris but you know you know what i mean like he's yeah able to ramp up the audience emotions here it feels like ruben is just doing an impression of someone who he's seen do that like he doesn't really have the capability it's just like i know this would work on the right audience they get the cheers that he wants and stuff, but he's not good at it, Matt. No, no, no. I totally agree.

If I compare him doing it with Trump or with Jordan Peterson or pretty much any evangelical preacher, yeah, they've got the fire and the passion and can really sell it. I mean, a lot of people call Ruben a grifter and i get why because it's kind of more obvious in his case that this is like a job you know i i just get that you know you get that vibe from we'll probably i mean it'll be interesting to compare the recordings here with when he's talking much more casually with bill maher but like he's playing a role right now and it's sort of obvious to you now but it's even more obvious when you contrast it with him just relaxing we're going to get to that very shortly god bless us but

that notion like i i think he's an ideologue as well i think dave rubin is just so breathed out like such so easily led that on the one hand he is leaning into all the tropes he is just repeating whatever he knows you know that the audience will hear but when you've heard him discuss things like on joe rogan's podcast or whatever in a less structured way he's an idiot right like he just hears things and parrots them and he can't really respond to critical comments or anything he's so i feel that he's both an ideologue and like a grifter in the truest sense of the term like it doesn't it doesn't matter that he actually believes it but he is so stupid that he does believe yeah that's fair i'll concede that he's an ideologue but only a very

very superficial ideologue like yeah yeah like it does not run deep with him as you say he just parrots so there's stuff like he's picked up the people that you should reference in the right wing that are seen as hero figures and stuff like that and i'll just play the very last clip from this content where he's giving the end of that speech that we just heard. And you'll hear him reference a certain figure at the end. You know, this is the kind of thing that gets conservatives hard. So now let's get to the good part of this. The good part of this is that throughout history, guys, there have been bad ideas. There have been fascists and communists and socialists and Nazis and a whole bunch of other bad ideas. There have been fascists and communists and socialists and Nazis and a whole bunch of

other bad people. And then good people start saying things that are true. You stop participating in the lie. You stand up and you say, I am here, I have worth, and I am not going to pretend anymore that you are good or valuable just because you guilt me into thinking something. Okay. You know, who's a good person. She was a great person. I wish we still had her. Can we maybe work on the cloning thing?

Let's talk to somebody in the UK about cloning her. Here's Margaret Thatcher on responding to socialists, right? Responding to these types of people who would otherwise give us endless chaos. Oh, you're not going to play Margaret Thatcher. I was looking forward to that. I don't like her. otherwise give us endless chaos. Oh, you're not going to play Margaret Thatcher? I was looking forward to that.

No, I don't agree. She's better at delivering speeches as well. But like, my God, Matt, that was such a hard turn to, and you know who is a good person. Let's play Margaret Thatcher talking about society. And just with Ruben, you don't know sometimes whether it's a stupidity or it's intentional because for example there he calls out extremists right and ideologues and then this next paragraph is about you are the good people stop accepting the lie and stand up in your society look for you can restore the real value that's fucking like that's the rhetoric of all those groups that you just said that you denounced

right so he's like yeah yeah the thing that i find interesting like this is what you're talking to which is the mismatch between the self-concept and the reality. Like clearly people like Dave Rubin like to conceive of themselves as open-minded liberals, right? The antithesis of socialism and fascism and communism and so on. And it's so far away. Like, you know, the apolitical centrist is the fond self-concept. so far away, like, you know, the apolitical centrist is the fond self-concept. But, you know, from the clips that we've played, it's easy to see that he's part of the conspiratorial MAGA verging on QAnon right. So there's a massive mismatch there and he doesn't seem to be aware of

it. He's that superficial. But the other thing that I'll say is that this calls back to the previous clip you played, which is that he doesn't deliver it very effectively, but you can see the intent there, which is that we are part of the true, the just, the uprighteous people who care about truth and freedom, all of the good things. We're part of a club. You can support the club by sending me money, sure. But I guess that's part of the appeal, right? That we are the good people.

And if we stick together and stay the path, then we can triumph over the forces of darkness. So when it comes to doing the Garometer episode, we can remember that, I think. Yeah. So now we'll move to Bill Maher and Ruben chatting, which was our original, you know, intention to cover. But just after hearing all of that garbage, Matt, I just want to play one clip from a bit into the conversation with Bill Maher. So just listen to

this. Well, I think Jews probably should be conservatives most. First off, I don't even consider myself a conservative. The book that I'll give you at the end there, it's a defense of classical liberalism. I think you'd read the book and you would go, you know, maybe a little bit. I'm more on the like, I don't really want any government programs anymore. So I definitely have more of that stuff now, maybe than you do. But I think you'd read that book and be like, we're 95 there yeah politically yeah yeah i'm not a conservative and bill bill maher agrees with that that sounds right because dave ribbons a nice guy right they're having a nice chat together they're having a drink and getting stoned together um well he he laughs at that initially but you know bill maher

is very willing to say you know you and me dave when we put aside the political stuff you know we're good people we both want the good things and stuff like this but you'll see in this conversation that the political is always just under the surface and there is a lot that bill maher gives a pass to. But you just imagine, right? All that shit that we've just heard, just from one episode of Ruben's show, and he puts them out, you know, multiple times each week.

Bill Maher could go listen to a single episode of Ruben, and he would presume that he would notice just how polemical and how extreme dave rubin is but i will bet you money he never listens to rubin's show yeah yeah not even a single episode yeah yeah it's almost certainly just incredibly lazy isn't it so i mean let me ask you this chris why does someone like bill maher have someone like Dave Rubin on his show? Is it that he just happens to know him and likes him or is it just cross promotional? He's famous, so people from both sides of the spectrum and and also that they previously were bundled together in the heterodox sphere right there with sam harris and because dave rubin for example was part of the platform he was part of the idw but he platformed

sam harris after that kind of infamous running that he had with Ben Affleck on Bill Marshall where Ben Affleck accused him of of being bigoted against Muslims and Dave Rubin likewise at least in his story he claims that he left the Young Turks in part because of their treatment about Sam Harris over accusations of anti-Muslim bigotry. So I think there's a kind of, you know, like the general heterodox against the far left misrepresentation of people like Sam Harris and that kind of thing. I get it. Yeah.

There's a little bit of heterodox common ground there. Yeah. Okay. get it yeah there's a little bit of heterodox common ground there yeah okay but i think more to contemporary era stuff is to do as well matt potentially with covid and you know as we heard in the last episode bill maher's views about vaccination and lack of concern about covid in the way that it's presented by the liberal left. So listen to this. Now you've hit on the one raw nerve with me on this issue

that could make me go to Florida or anywhere else, and that's COVID. Yeah. And their overreaction, in my view, and their limited ability to understand that please look i want to be a team player but you can't get inside my body no and that has to be my decision they were for my body my choice wasn't that them that's okay that's an unfair analogy because we're talking about a different life yep yep well look they got some common ground here right the government overreach and i mean this clip was this was one of the original reasons i thought covering them together would be good because there you can hear

you know what we covered last week which is bill maher's, my body, my sacred body, you cannot put something into my body. That is the classical anti-vaccine. There's poison,imericel, mercury, right? It's toxins that you're injecting into my body. Alongside Dave Rubin's right wing, the government doesn't have the right to tell you what to do. Public health campaigns are just the first step on the road to authoritarianism. And they can do that meme where they're reaching across the aisles, kind of clasping arms. But when Rubin tries to tie it to a right wing talking point where he says, you know, yeah, and this is the part of my body, choice you can see mar's discomfort where he's like well no that's that's let's stick on the covert not about

abortion yeah yeah and there was another point of discomfort too chris wonder if you have the clip there which is when bill maher is doing that kind of you know thing where they go oh the world's gone so crazy now i remember when people were normal and everyone's so partisan and ideological and bill maher starts talking about like q anon and mega people right that's right that's the truth see you are an old school liberal oh i am you are an old school but it's getting lonely don't you think it's getting lonely in a way watching just watching so many of the people that you used to think were sane or guys that you would bring on your show over the years that really were sane. That goes both ways. Yeah.

Because I certainly have seen a number of people become Trumpers and, like, you know, I don't want to, like, reveal too much and have people know who I'm talking about. But some people who you would never think, who are not that, you're not, like, 60, 70 years know who I'm talking about but some people who you would never think who are not that you're not like 60-70 years old. I'm talking about 40 and From places you would never think and now are full-on QAnon Democrats eat babies and there's a pedophile. I don't think they eat them. They drink the blood. It's not an eating situation

They order thought it was yeah, they them and then push them around the plate. That's really what they do. It's that sushi spin thing. But watching the lefties sort of go nutty, because that's sort of what people say about you now, that you stayed. And they kind of did go nuts. I wish they didn't. I wish they didn't.

I wish they didn't. Oh, me too. No, except that it's more material. You know, it's like I... When did you see it? I used to have... What happened? When did you see it first?

Like, when did you see the thing really changing? And it was just funny to see how quickly Dave Rubin steers the conversation away from that towards lefties going crazy. Yeah, well, I have one I think spiritually makes the same point. So this is when Dave Rubin is suggesting that Bill Maher is becoming red pilled and maybe he'll get to the point to vote for the Republicans. And here's his reaction. It's the shirt. How Republican you make the anal sex. I'll fully red pill you.

That's what we call it. When you're splayed out over the bed. That's what we call it, Marr. Is that it? Yeah, yeah, because everyone's like, Bill Maher's almost there. What does he need to finally get over the hump? I know what it is, Bill. Oh, I know what it is, too, and it's not that.

First of all, you've got to break up with your boyfriend, Donald Trump. Okay, so forget Trump. We don't even have to do politics if you don't want. No, but I'm just saying, you brought it up. Yeah. You brought it up. Fair enough. You brought it up.

Meh. And I'm telling you. All right, so let's, okay. That's, I, red pill. You know, you people make me laugh. Okay, so. As if you think that I would even entertain the idea of joining up with a social club that made Donald Trump its president.

This fucking twice-divorced casino owner. That's who you think. Well, you would grant me that Bill Clinton's a rapist, right? A rapist? No, I wouldn't. Yeah, yeah. So you can see them touching on that divide there as well. And then just the notion that, you know, that Maher is close to getting red-pilled.

So Dave Rubin references that and he talks about it a couple of times in the conversation. So there's a bit about it where, so Bill Maher, for a big part of the conversation, focuses on gay sex. He does. The mechanics on it, the relative hygiene practices, why people are interested in that. And this is kind of his thing. He wants to make these conversations not about, supposedly, not about politics, just about, you know, hanging out and talking about nonsense. But I've received general feedback that it's a bit like Rogan, where he says that, but every episode COVID comes up or politics come up, right? So it isn't exactly like that but you know when you were asking matt about like why does he have him on it's clear that there's a little bit of discomfort

around the potential for the subject to be focused on politics and so listen to this and this is club random no but i we don't do that we don't do that shit here no We don't do that shit here? No, we don't do, like, who are your community heroes and, like, you know, what kind of outpost does your dog eat? I mean, you know, that's too, like, question you get in the press. Here we're just, we're here to talk about gay sex, Dave. We're gay sex? I want to know. I do want to know one thing. I want to know.

I do want to know one thing. Now, okay, so when did you start it out liking girls or thinking, or you never did? I never really thought about it that way, sort of. Well, first off, people always say to me, you don't seem gay. That's the thing that I get all the time. You don't seem gay. Yeah. Bill Maher has a real interest in this.

He keeps steering the conversation towards it dev ribbon isn't really comfortable talking about it which i totally understand actually because bill maher is asking him stuff like like what specifically do you think about when you masturbate there's two or three questions what do you think about when you masturbate yeah i'm talking about like there but there takes sodium pentothal and they have to tell the truth you only have a few minutes to get to know them yeah how do you think about when you masturbate? I'm talking about like there takes sodium pentothal and they have to tell you the truth. You only have a few minutes to get to know them. How do you get your money? Who are you fucking? What do you think about when you masturbate? Have you got those three answers on, you know, I mean, sometimes it's not that scandalous.

Like, I don't know about you, Chris, but like, if I, like, that's not a question I'm going to answer in public, right? Yeah. So there's, yeah, there is that. And you can see that Ruben wants to present himself as, you know, I'm up for anything. I'll talk about anything, but he is not comfortable and like just to give an example of like how graphic the discussion goes here's a segment about anal sex chat you know i do have gay sex that's one of that's something good for you and i know people find that to be odd or it's a little out there for some people it's well it is odd i i accept that it is odd right like it's a little bizarre

for people it's also it's, but it's also normal. Because it's obviously a variation that nature intended. I mean, it's not the majority, but it is consistent, and it's throughout history. And for some reason, nature wanted this little sub-variant where you take it in the ass. I don't get it it because I hate shit. So, like, the idea of fucking and shit is just so anathema to me, I can't even tell you. Bill, do you realize my mother loves you, and she's going to watch this?

But, I mean, it's where the... She agrees with you more than she agrees with me. And look, I love that you live your life as you love it, and I love that for everybody, but we can't deny that's where this shit comes out. It just blows my mind because I don't like taking a shit. Right. So the idea that I would stick my dick in there is just weird.

And it goes on. Yeah, quite a lot. Quite an elaborate discussion about this point. It's probably the only thing that could make me feel sorry for dave rubin just having to be talking to bill ma continually steering the conversation towards the mechanics of his sex life especially because like part of rubin's whole thing is he's gay right but he doesn't want to emphasize that point to his audience except like he definitely doesn't want them talking about the relevant mechanics and his sex life like you can hear that he doesn't want to be on that topic

look obviously for audience political reasons it's not a good topic for him but also any normal person chris any normal yeah i know yeah i know like that is true that is also the key is but i think in rubens there's just a double bind that yeah nobody well they're not nobody i'm sure there's lots of people that like to go into graphic detail about their sexual lives in fact i do know that those people exist but for the majority of people it's probably not something that they want to discuss in public in great depth so i do have sympathy for ruben on that point but yeah and one point to note there though is you see that nature intended like nature wanted this variation it speaks to his world view

right that like i know that he's trying to voice their view that he's okay with people being gay it's fine right it's not unnatural which is a good sentiment but it's it's still tinder that notion he has about muller nature or earth force like nature determined that he wanted some people to have like gay sex and you're just like he's got a very personified view a kind of woosh view about nature and biology and all that yeah yeah it's a subtle influence there but yeah given all the other things we've heard him say i think you're right about that yeah so sticking on the the thing about like what bill wants to talk about and what ruben alternatively might have wanted to talk about a

bit more here's a bit which comes up in several points about we already heard one occasion where he's talking about maybe you'll vote for de santos and here again this comes up My entire crowd wants me to beat you over the head until you admit that you would vote for Ron DeSantis and you're asking me about anal sex. I know but it's my show so shut the fuck up. Alright, alright. And it's not a political show. It's like if we were actually just sitting around

talking, would you like have that agenda? If you had an agenda I wouldn't invite you here. Yeah, if Reuben had an agenda, he wouldn't have been invited. I think Reuben has a slight agenda, you know, from all the stuff that we previously heard. Although I think these kinds of things are just straight up cross-promotional to relatively famous people doing their thing i mean one thing chris though

is that it has to be said having listened to this entire rambling conversation too much of which was devoted to the mechanics of anal sex it's just it was so tedious like they it was so scattergunned it's like ma definitely is is a bit blitzed ruben not so much but is a cretin so it was my god it's such tedious tedious content i mean i know it went nowhere i know it did but like i think that it is mostly a cross-promotional exercise but the fact that Ruben is talking about his audience wants to you know he's expected to red pill Bill Maher or that's what they want out of it and Bill Maher wants to talk to him about anal sex right like that's what Bill Maher wants I don't know if that's what Bill Maher's audience wants to hear but that's his goal but you can see Ruben at times like I mean he's a really big DeSantis sim this is worth noting

that like yeah I listened to Ruben's content on occasion mainly just because I've subscribed when we were previously covering something and it was relevant but also because he gives you an insight into what's going on in the right and he's very much switched from his Trump focus to DeSantis, although he still holds on the sycophantic prayers for Trump. But it's clear if DeSantis gives him the option, he will completely switch to DeSantis at the drop of a hat. And he already mostly has. But so you do hear him bring this up again. So we've already heard DeSantis twice and again. Would you say that spit take was...

I thought you were going to go back to... I thought you were going to go like, so did DeSantis prove to you... You know what? If California says I have to take shots and DeSantis says

I don't, hello Florida. That's what I'll. And DeSantis says, I don't. Hello, Florida. That's what I'll say about DeSantis. He's a good dude. He's a good dude. He really is. And he doesn't care whether you smoke weed, and he doesn't care who you marry.

He doesn't. But to sound like the voiceover at a movie that's coming out soon, shit just got real. But like for me, personally, really, shit just got real with that. Yeah. And that's in my mind. Dude, I left this place because of it. And I don't want to leave this place.

It would be very hard. That's interesting. Some real talk there, right? that's interesting some real talk there right so you can see there how a particular conspiratorial obsession like someone like bill maher has with vaccines and natural health can lead you like it can't become the overriding issue even though you know in broader ideological political terms it's he's like a terrible fit for de santos he yeah he will go there i think that happens to a lot of normal people right yeah and again matt this is kind of dropping back to the bill maher world but just listen to maher discuss the issue

about his bodily autonomy and and how regards it, how important it is. That's different than this is my body. This is my body, my health. And to pretend that you have enough information with all the things they've been wrong about. Everything. Everything. I'm not talking about COVID. I'm talking about medicine in general. All the things they've been wrong about, not mostly because they're corrupt, just because we don't know that much. And all the things they don't know and are still knowing. And every week there's some new story about something. I always say they should, somebody should write a book about medicine and called it, call it. Now you tell me. it call it now you tell me like they just found out that metabolism which they always thought slowed down in age actually doesn't now you tell me you know all the drugs they pulled off the market because they said they were safe and effective but they weren't yeah now you tell me

yolks you don't eat yolks yeah right it's like you don't have a monopoly on what the truth is about medicine. And we're all individuals. My profile is different than somebody else's profile. So what might be right for them, would I recommend as many vaccines and boosters as they have for people who are 100 pounds overweight? I would. You probably need them. I don't, or I don't think I don't. And that should be my decision. And even if it did affect you, which it doesn't, because we know that having the vaccine, you can still transfer it just as easy or get it just as easy. So that's a red herring argument to begin with. It shouldn't involve that. But even if it did, it's still my body.

I want to be a team player. I want to help everybody. But you can't come inside my body. It's not subtle, is it? Like there's some, the anti-vax, you know, the fear about the bodily contamination from these potentially hazardous vaccines, that's really core to Bill Maher's whole thing. It's not a superficial, just an aspect he has. It's obviously very deep.

Yeah, and it's connected to his more general view because anti-vaxxers have quite a specific thing the skepticism of modern medicine and that preference for natural holistic things and bespoke customized tailored treatments and the skepticism about how much we don't know and how it's also complex it's a real mystery the importance of autonomy in figuring it out and making your own health decisions. And you know better than the authorities, just like the mummy intuition. You'll see it on Facebook, mother's groups about anti-vax. Like it's all stuff that you've seen in the academic literature. And it illustrates how anti-vax views do actually stem from a broader worldview around health,

bodily autonomy, and that kind of thing. So, yeah, there's nothing original in anything Bill Maher thinks about vaccines. This is all stuff like we could get a highlighter and pull out that table from one of those ANCADA papers that you like, Chris, and we could highlight each of the tropes that he hits upon. It's good because you actually see what his reading list is. Like you see the stuff that's infiltrated his brain from the internet

or books or whatever. So, you know, there were clips I was going to play, Matt, which was Dave Rubin trying to get spiritual and talk about the cosmic creator and stuff in the middle of this episode but i honestly don't think it's worthwhile because there's nothing there well first of all what does that mean the universe i mean it's just the vaguest sort of the you must know that the universe really doesn't give a shit about you. It is not sending you messages. It's definitely, it's not. No, I think you can find messages within the nonsense.

That doesn't mean that the universe handed them to you or that even that there's a divine thing doing it. But you can find moments that have meaning. Like, I mean, really, think about it this way. From the universe. What? Well, I don't know. You can call it the universe or whatever. There are, it's not all random.

Here we are in Club Random. It's not all, it's not all completely random, right don't know. You can call it the universe or whatever. It's not all random. Here we are in Club Random. It's not all completely random, right? It is, actually. You think it's all completely random? What are we saying all? The fact that you're here and you showed up on time? That wasn't random. We arranged it.

That it's any order to any of this? You think it's all just... Well, first of all, we'll never know because we don't know, you know, we can basically... Well, you're right, we'll never know. Look, you say it all the time on the show that it's okay to say you don't know. Absolutely. And you're totally right. Of course you're right.

I'll tell you what it is. He, like, went for a walk on the anniversary of someone's death and then the clouds opened at some part when he was about to walk back and him and his sister took it as a sign and he thinks this plus him talking to bill maher after either wanting to be a success for so long shows there's some cosmic power and jordan peterson has made him say that it's so stupid and you know lots of people have this kind of thing but with dave rubin it's so vacuous and empty and he takes so long to tell this absolutely mundane point of view which proves nothing it's just the sun shines out of a cloud

at a specific moment that he takes uh yeah yeah his big point is that he's got a vibe that everything has a purpose things are meant to happen that kind of stuff it's yeah yeah we can skip it there's nothing there's absolutely nothing listeners we listen to it so you don't have to let's move on yeah so maybe the thing to round this terrible detour on is we, you know, try on a couple occasions, but at the end on a positive note. So I have one clip of something that I kind of agree with Dave Rubin on. But before that, let's just see if Rubin has accurately pegged his audience because he discusses his audience at one point. So let's see how accurate he is. So what can I glean from if I go on tour and my audience is mostly conservative and they're usually somewhat religious but i get

a lot of your guys too i get a lot of like the disaffected liberals or whatever you want to call that right but they love me they love me and they think i'm i'm honest which i am and i think that i'm decent which i am and i i'm a little different they're over the gay thing no they're over it they absolutely are and that's why that's why the woke are so dangerous. Because the right, and here's where I would give Trump credit, maybe you wouldn't. Trump was literally on stage with a fucking rainbow flag, which is, I hate the rainbow flag. I have nothing to do with the LGBT community.

Yes, I have nothing to do with any of that. The Rubin there is presenting himself as, you know, I'm a pretty moderate guy. I get conservatives. But, you know, I'm a pretty moderate guy. I get conservatives, but you know, there's liberals that come and people think I'm honest. And like, just to key in my, in the context of where we just heard him outright polemical lies in the first segment of clips from his show. And also that notion that the right is now completely comfortable with homosexuality and stuff, it's not true, right? So gay marriage, more acceptable on the right now, yes.

And Donald Trump can be on stage with a rainbow flag. But you don't have to go very far to see evangelical reaction to like anything about, you know, talking about gay lifestyles or same-sex parents, or just go a little bit farther and you have Nick Fuentes and the people who present that as a perversion against Christ, against the traditional values of society and so on. So it isn't that now the right-wing conservative movement is completely fine with gay people. That's all in the past. No, mainstream right-wing politicians

might not campaign on that, but there's a very thick, active strata on the right which is not okay with gays and just look at milo yiannopoulos right he was a gay provocateur and what's he turned out to be now he's shilling religious icons and promoting gay conversion therapy on rightwing farler right religious stuff so yeah just just an example but yeah yeah yeah i know i know someone who was especially like at the level of the conspiratorial q anon stuff that ruben deals with and promulgates i mean like i've seen so many versions of that like that any gay couple that say adopts children has got to be doing it for the purpose of child abuse or satanic rituals or something. Like the level that he's working at is not moderate conservatism or classical liberalism.

The guy that was disgusted, he shook his hand with him. Does that show that now I know the right ring? Like, Dave Rubin had that guy on his show, and they're politically aligned, and then on his home audience, he either feigns or genuinely expresses disgust at having shook hands with a gay person. Yeah, I think if Dave Rubin has anything original to what he does, it's that he does kind of whitewash the extreme edge of QAnon mega politics, right? The way he frames it is just, look, it's just normal, right-thinking, upstanding people who are open-minded and liberal in pretty much all respects.

Just wants, you know, DeSantis is cool with smoking pot. Just once, you know, DeSantis is cool with smoking pot. You know, yeah, the way he puts it is that this is just like normal stuff that normal, healthy, right-thinking Americans would be into. It's not crazy conspiratorial stuff. Yeah, and he does have like a clean-cut, wholesome image, right? Like he looks good, he's healthy, you you know he projects that kind of image so he doesn't come across as frankly sick like someone like alex jones yeah and the other aspect of it is he does make those things more palatable but he's also just lying in a way because like

you know there's a famous clip of ben shapiro talking with ruben and ruben saying you know but you would come to my anniversary party wouldn't you you know because we're friends you might not approve the marriage but and ben shapiro's like no you know because it's against my religious values to celebrate your thing and and so ruben knows that that exists that it isn't all sunshine and lollipops on the right maybe there's more tolerance than before but it's not the case that nobody cares about it anymore so yeah he's just yeah anyway you said you seem surprised that he's lying about this particular thing it's not i'm not i just i guess it's just annoying that people can lie outright about this kind of thing and you know like in the environment that he's in with bill maher and

stuff there's going to be some pushback on some points but like most of it will just slip past and they'll move on to talking about something else but it's why i'm a little bit wary about describing rubin as just being about like cross promotion and this because he's still hitting all the talking points and you know i think bill maher ending up voting republican wouldn't be that surprising for the reasons he himself outlines, right? Like if he perceived that vaccination was going to, and the thing is, the Republican Party is going to make anti-vaccination a core part of their message, it seems like, you know, like like you said the kind of grievance

politics so yeah maybe rubin is right to view this as a an exercise of political outreach yeah i guess so i mean i guess i guess i just assume that he's primarily like an entrepreneur he's looking to make money by being a political pundit like i i guess i see him as a as a pure grifter so i don't see him really caring that much as to the outcomes see i think it doesn't contradict because if ruben succeeded in being part of the catalyst for more coming out as red pill and endorsingSantis. That would completely play into his grift. That would be a trophy for him, right? So it can be both that he is just happy to be invited

on a relatively famous person and is going to be quite sycophantic and at times diplomatic in what he says. But also, if he can get bill maher to endorse more republican talking points that serves his purposes and he'll claim it as he was partly responsible for it if it happens yeah it's just that i see these kinds of shows where like let's take bill maher's club random thing as an example that he's got has had sean penn on andrew sullivan woody harrelson like a bunch of names i don't know but i assume they're

relatively famous right and i almost think that they they just get people on because they're relatively famous that's what they do and relatively famous people go on because bill maher himself is relatively famous it's just kind of what they do and then they kind of go well what the hell are we going to talk about so they so they meander about yeah but that's that's from ma's side that's not ruben's side like ruben is happy to be there but the guests that go there they often do have their own agenda or thing that they want to talk about like woody harrelson very recently was on snl and gave a big monologue about anti-vaccine stuff and on his appearance with bill maher he was talking about the same thing yeah yeah but i mean but you know he's

so shallow like you heard what he talked about when he was talking about something that wasn't politics you know how he thought he saw the sun come through the clouds and he thought everything had a purpose. Like it's just weak, right? He doesn't have anything else going on in his head apart from political punditry. So like, of course he's going to talk. So I guess to me, that's the point is like, I'm not saying he's the strategist working behind the scenes. I think he's just brain melted and he's not very intelligent.

So, you know, that is what he's going to talk about but he'll he'll take opportunities where he can and like he is a polemicist now and i i think my sticking point is just the version where ruben is not really believing what he's saying i don't think it's the case because i think he's that stupid that he he is a true believer at the same time as being absolutely a polemicist who will say whatever he needs to in the moment i can't remember if we've had this conversation online before on the show before but i've argued about people with this many times which is that there's no contradiction here there's no contradiction people just believe whatever it is that suits them. And he's not very deep. He's not going

to put in the mental energy to be pretending to do his job and then to have his own sort of secret worldview that's separate from that. No, no. People just align their beliefs to what's convenient for them. So, I just never see a contradiction with you know are they grifting and pretending in scare quotes or are they really ideologues like for me it's just like well what's the thing that's motivating him and he's an entrepreneur he's a businessman like he started off in comedy did a thing with the young turks like anything that will get clicks and get downloads and earn him money i mean it's a job like we see with so many people in the discourse. Yeah.

We're different though, Chris. We're different because it's a hobby for us. That's very different. Yeah, I'm sure that completely inoculates us. But in any case, I've just had enough of thinking about Bill Maher, or anyone like them. You know, it would have been very hard to cover them both together. So it was a good idea to separate them.

But my God, do I want to get back to people who are a little bit more, you know, interesting in any way. So Ruben, much like Bill Maher, is a polemical pundit. And he's a not very intelligent one. That's my take on him. There's nothing really there except he's good at selling. You know, he's essentially a throwback in a way to like the polished TV presenter. He can do that. he's he's empty he's just this soulless husk of a human and he's been filled up by the absolute

lowest rank right-wing partisanship and yeah there's very little to analyze that isn't on the surface because he's all surface. That's all he is. That's a good summary. I co-sign every one of those statements, particularly the ones about him being superficial, all surfaces and just not very interesting. You know, recycled conspiratorial talking points that sit somewhere in between uh tucker carlson and alex jones delivered in his own particular style but yeah there's nothing there of interest to us um i don't want to spoil the grometer but he'll probably ding a couple of things but he's just he's just not deep enough to to be doing the guru-ish things it's just rank punditry you can see him aping the people that we've covered

like he wants to be that kind of figure in a way to his audience but he's just crap so like the thing is like there are aspects of it where he's doing an imitation of Jordan Peterson or he's doing an imitation of Tucker Carlson or whatever. But it's like he's just a real imitation. Yeah. Like if you compare him to, say, someone like Douglas Murray, right? Douglas Murray is similar in some respects, right? That he's often talking to right-wing anti-leftist talking points,

political punditry, monologuing, that kind of thing. Polished speaker as well. But Douglas Murray has some, for all his faults, some depth to it. Like he'll put together things that are particularly Douglas Murray in arguments and frameworks and rhetoric. And yeah, but the thing with Ruben is that it's like it's targeted at 10-year-olds. Like it's really simple stuff.

It's lowest common denominator stuff. So yeah. Yeah. So we're sorry. We're sorry for inflicting this upon the people, but there he is. He's off the docket. We don't need to do Ruben again and I don't think he's going to score particularly high on the grommeter just because he's he's not

good at things so um yeah so this will be an illustration that it is not just people we dislike because I really dislike Ruben I politically dislike him as a person i dislike him and yeah i don't think he's going to score that highly on the garometer no no okay he's not even going to do well at that matt he's failed at it as well yeah i mean look i'm just looking here though i don't want to spoil the surprise with the Garometer, but conspiracy mongering, that's there. Grievance mongering, that's there. Anti-establishment terrorism. Yeah, I know where he's going to score high

and where he's going to score low. He'll hit about half of them. He'll hit maybe two and a half, but the other ones he'll score very low on. Yeah, all the ones that require some sort of intellectual, even pseudo-intellectual effort like galaxy brightness he's gonna fail at yeah i agree so in any case off he goes adi vedachi goodbye david rubin into uh back to your bunker and like say, we'll try to get some more substantial figures in the next while.

But, you know, for calibration purposes, it's useful on occasion. And we do have to, this year, dip into the left-wing commentariat space. But we'll maybe try to lean more towards left-wing guru types. space but we'll maybe try to lean more towards like left-wing guru types so yeah i'm wondering who dave rubin's left wing equivalent is answers on a postcard but i don't want to do him whoever it is we might end up doing him but you know just yeah yeah let's let's do someone who's going to score highly next time make the garamita go ding yes that's right now because matt we stopped canvassing for reviews we've got a dearth of new reviews so this is a problem for a review of review segment but i did come across one negative one from this month so this this one is pretty good. It's titled Grifters with Delusions of Grandeur. So

here's us, Matt, being grifters. It's a short review. It just says unbearably smug, unlistenable. That's from Eric Jones, 79. So, you know, Matt, maybe we are, are we the Dave Rubins for some people out there? It seems so. We're the smug grifters. Maybe we are the mirror image of Dave Rubin. Could be. Could be. Could be. And there's a positive review then to balance that with, which is by A Brain Galactic.

It's a little bit long, but I'll read a selection from it. It says, criticism hidden as witticism, a low quality endeavor, five stars. I like that. These two neoliberal shills don't fool with their fake accents, lulling you into unconscious submission with their disc approved neuro-linguistic programming aimed at reducing your involute and tremendous personal convictions with doctored and unrelenting criticisms. The CIA-approved tactic will helplessly mold your mind into the dull collectivist acquiescence of a babe in bunting carried down the river to Babel's Tower for reprocessing as meat in the New World Order. That's a good exercise in creative writing.

That's good. Well, we can always get ChatGPT to create reviews for us if we can't get enough of them. But I just Googled it, Chris, and I see in various sites, I don't know if we've done these ones before, but there's lots of good reviews out there. Of course, we have hundreds of reviews. These are new ones, Matt.

I'm canvassing new ones. That's the contemporary reviews. I don't like to go into the past. I only live in the present. You only go forward. I'm a shark. Yeah, so that's where we are. So, you know, more reviews, please.

More reviews. I can't look back at old reviews. I only can see the future so supply us with reviews or it'll be back to the wisdom of makila it's up to you you don't want that guys trust me yeah no patrons matt we need to shout them out i'm always wary about this segment because of the difficulty I have in tracking who's been shouted out. But here we're going to go. And I'm going to first shout out the conspiracy hypothesizers. They are Will Simmons, Ken Harris, Daniel Farley, Daniel Farley Mizzou's Frist

Undead Legend Louise Jessica Greg Tuff Sean Hacobian and Patrick That is our conspiracy hypothesizers for this week.

Thank you guys. I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions. And they've all circulated this list of correct answers. I wasn't at this conference. This kind of shit makes me think, man, it's almost like someone is being paid. Like when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.

We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. I really like Joe Rogan's tone there. It's like this sort of 60s kind of hippie thing. This kind of shit, man. Yeah, I know. And these guys advancing, you know, plans. It's like, it's you, Joe. You're the one saying that, you know,

all these people saying Soros is up to shit. Like you, you're saying it right now. But anyway, those were conspiracy hypothesizers. Our revolutionary thinkers, Matt, they include Lachlan Gilchrist, Alex Weschler, David Love, Maureen Matt not you

a different Matt Max Liam Dobson Bill W2011 Jonathan Kano I wonder like the Mortal Kombat character and

Sean Carmody and Patrick Dunlop. Those are revolutionary thinkers. Thank you. I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time. And it is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.

I'm someone who's a true polymath. I'm all over the place. But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption. Now, that's just a guess. And it could easily be wrong. But it also could not be wrong. The fact that it's even plausible is stunning. That one always catches me off guard. Brett weinstein reaction to jordan's comment yeah i'd like yeah you know contrasting delivery like you're saying about how ruben is just so unconvincing

he's like a pale imitation and you know brett he's he's got the delivery that you know it's that that emotion is coming through yeah so last month the shining stars and the guru size the galaxy brain gurus who are welcome to talk to us once a month at long ask me anything live streaming chat hangout events they are sarahle, Sean Chinnery, Rez, SM Jenkins, the Hey Elliot podcast, Thomas T, For Arsef, Tim Rossiter, Tom Allison, Tom V, Tom Yasko, and Trey DeVille. Very good. Well done, Chris. Thank you, everyone. Yeah, thank you all. We tried to warn people

like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything. Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense. I have no tribe. I'm in exile. Think again, sunshine. Yeah.

The thing that that last clip just made me think about, I actually missed Scott Adams. This makes me pine for Scott Adams because, like, he's evil, but at least there's, you something entertaining to him like ruben oh fuck me that's sorry yeah no i know evil but complicated in a way you know or like he's got there's stuff going on there that we could talk about but what can you say about dave rubin nothing no nothing except what we did say but um all right so for two hours yeah i know anyway yeah sorry about this episode everyone it's we had to get it done we listened to those episodes we had to put them out but um they

can't all be bangers there's got to be some fillers like side b stuff that's how it works we'll be back we'll be back on side a so don't worry this is just yeah that's well well anyway thank you for listening accord the disc note the gin be aware of what a prat the rubin is and go about your lives good advice bye everyone Oh, we're recording.