W-S-I-B presents The Lost Finger Club. I just got here after a table saw me step at work. Oh, come meet the crew. That's Pinky, pointy, and that's how.
What's that guy's problem? That's the bird. He can't help it. Keep your bits.
Learn more at practiceafework.ca. Welcome to Deconstructive Criticism. I am Aaron Flamm. This episode's guest is comedian, YouTuber, and soon to the author, Dave Rubin.
It is Dave's second time as a guest on Deconstructive Criticism, and much have happened since then. In this episode, we talk about his tour with Jordan D. Peterson, the headlines caused by that visit to Sweden, and our former Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Michael Balestram's call for Jordan P. Peterson, to crawl back under the rock he came from.
Dave's coming book Don't Burn This Book, election year in the United States, and Dave's new platform for creators trying to decentralize the internet and us restoring its glory. But first, I want to thank you for supporting Deconstructive Criticism. Without your support, I wouldn't be able to do interviews like the one you're about to hear. So if you haven't yet become a patron, donated the Abitcoin, PayPal, or SWISH, 0768943737, please do so now.
My business model is based on microdonations, or as Swedish state radio calls it, prostitution. To international listeners, I apologize but Swedish state radio, whose finance, through attacks that no one got to vote for, just called free media, Venmo Horse, in Swedish swishwars. Which for some reason is considered a more serious offense than stealing the denizens' money, and using it to brainwash people with unceasing propaganda. Even though stealing is a criminal offense, while selling yourself is not legally speaking in Sweden, a crime.
The excuse offered by the Swedish radio that their correspondent was unaware of the meaning of the word whore is as believable as the one offered by a John Court buying sex. Oh, is that what prostitution is? I wasn't aware, I'm dyslectic. And you do well to remember that, my dear listener, and that if Swedish state radio can call me and others, you might support prostitutes.
That means they're calling you a sex buyer, which in Sweden is a criminal offense. So I suggest you show state radio what you think of their slander, and donate a large sum to me at 0768943737. Oh, 0768943737. I do not like to think of this show as a sexual act between you and me.
I like to think of it as much better than sex. Only two days before my return to Sweden, a very powerful bomb went off in my neighborhood back home. Only a block from Swedish state radio, by the way. Last year, there was over 230 such explosions in Sweden.
It is a miracle that no one has died or been named so far, and where lucky the damages are merely material. But no one seems to have a clue why these bombs are going off spontaneously everywhere. Not the police, not the media, and if they do, the citizenry is not told. It seems that the Swedish state monopoly on violence is broken, and I think that is a more pressing priority for a state radio to talk about or investigate, than calling free actors foul names.
Or for that matter, Iranian terrorists like Qasem Soleimani, continents. Soleimani was on an EU terrorist watch list, something on Swedish state media or public services they like to call themselves in a glorious feat of newspeak, neglected to mention. Incompetent buffoons as they are. And yes, you heard me correctly.
I call them buffoons. Harsh words I know, but when your country is a slow-simmering war zone, the word buffoon might be warranted. From that to something more pleasant. Dave Rubin is the host of the Rubin Report on YouTube.
He has been on a tour of the world with Jordan D. Peterson. He is soon releasing a book, and he has started his own platform for communication at locals.com. I myself have previously been a guest on his show, the Rubin Report, as he has previously been a guest on the constructive criticism.
Links to both episodes can be found on my webpage, AaronFlamm.com. And a few days after the interview you're about to hear, I, together with Swedish YouTuber, Helene Gjonson, went on the Rubin Report a second time, an interview that Dave will publish on his channel within the next few weeks. But for now, an exciting talk with Dave Rubin much have happened since last we met, and I must confess I was willfully unprepared for this interview. Dave, on the other hand, had fire in his eyes and a message to convey.
So here we go. Enjoy. Welcome back to the constructive criticism, Dave Rubin. Aaron, it is good to be with you, and I just want to say I knew that podcasting was big in Sweden, but I didn't know it could float the cost of like a $20 million Hollywood mansion.
So I'm really impressed. We're doing quite well. Partly, I think thanks to the work you're doing here. I guess demonetization has it hit you guys as badly as it's hit us on YouTube.
Well, I am demonetized on YouTube as a default. I can try and monetize videos, but then they demonetize them after a while if they think they're where someone reports them or whatever. Is that right? Your channel is actually demonetized just as the starting point?
Yes. And you have to then fight everything from there. Yes. Did they send you a message or something to that?
Yes, a very nice letter. Yes. So. I assume a very personal letter, YouTube and Google, they're known for their personal communication and the way they white glove handle you and all that sort of thing.
Well, it was so interesting because it was like two months before the Swedish election. How bizarre? Yes. So you're saying right before an election, they started doing things that might influence the Swedish creators' content.
Well, they were very strange. We would have an almost political debate. Yes. We're not going to monetize that.
No. No, no, no. That would be impossible in Sweden. We are still socialists.
Yes. Yes. Yes. So last time I saw you was when you were in Sweden with Jordan D.
Peterson. Yes. Yes. And you invited me to the show.
Thank you for that, by the way. My pleasure. Thank you for not heckling. Well, it was kind of hard to heckle.
You did a good warm up and then Jordan is well, not as funny as you are, but he has his strong points as well. Yeah. I don't think people are going there for the Jordan Peterson comedy hour. They're going for something a little deeper, but I'm sure I told you this after birth in a year or so since when we've communicated.
I mean, the two shows that we did in Stockholm, I think were probably two of the four most memorable shows that we did. We did something like 120 shows in about 20 countries in the course of a year. I mean, it was a pretty chaotic and a tight brutal tour of traveling all that. But the audiences were so incredibly present.
And you could tell that Jordan's voice was so obviously needed in Sweden, which I had sort of known intellectually from talking to you and a few other people and people that I see talking about things from Sweden on Twitter or whatever. But to be there in that room, you could feel it. And what was it? The Foreign Minister of Sweden, she wanted Jordan Peterson to tweet it out.
The cruel, the cruel, the rocky came from right before the second show. I think that was. So, you know, for us it added a lot of a comedy element to it. And then I did something that you attended that I had never done in any of the other shows when we do that meet and greet after.
And Jordan gets, you know, 200 people to pay. It's something like 100 extra dollars per show to take a picture and a handshake. And I do a smaller meet and greet, which we don't sell in advance. It's just very quickly where it runs to be there.
And usually I get just 20 or 30 people that come and because it's just happening, it has happened very quickly so that they can get to Jordan. But in Sweden, there were so many people that wanted to come that remember we packed that room. They were probably 60 or 70 people in this tiny room. And then I said, it's the only time I've done it.
I said, you know what? There's something so incredible happening here. And it's so obvious that this conversation that we're having so many questions. I said, we got, let's find a spot and we took the whole crew and went to a bar after and we had drinks for a couple hours.
And for me, it really was one of the most memorable nights of the entire tour. Thank you. Apart from that, did you enjoy the tour? Yeah, it was amazing because you've been all over the world now.
Yeah, it was amazing. I visited not only countries and cities in Europe that I had never been to, but many of the 40 or 50 of the cities that I visited in the United States, in the middle of the country I had never been to. So, you know, I got to see places that I'd never been. I got to meet people from all walks of life.
I mean, you know, the irony is when Jordan's critics will say, you know, he's a racist and he's a big kid and all of the nonsense that we all get thrown at. It's like, I'm meeting people every day. I met trans people that came to the shows. I met obviously, I met black people and Muslim people and white people and gay people and Asian people.
And no, I know that we and your audience don't care about that nonsense. But it's like one of the things that was so interesting to me was that we'd be on tour and I'd be seeing this man just give the best of himself to help people and see it really happening. I mean, see people, young people showing up to a show in suits and get a fresh haircut and fresh shave to show up and really had started to sit up straight with their shoulders back and clean their room and do a hot job. I'll do the rest of this interview sitting up straight.
I mean, you know, really giving people the tools to fix their life. And then at the same time, every day there'd be another hit piece written about him and the enforcement of he won. That was the big one in the New York Times. And so in Sweden.
Oh, was that in Sweden also? Yes, they were in force. I'd be somehow implying that he's in hand. He wants to force women to marry men.
His whole point was that he just believes that the state should have some degree of its light. Even it's really just that the institution of marriage plays a role, plays a role in building a healthy functioning society. Most of us understand that. There's a reason that people marry each other.
There's a reason people create families. So to see any way these hit pieces written about him and then see literally thousands of people every night change their lives and make their lives better because of the guy. It was incredible. And it really helped crystallize a lot of my thinking around all of this because it's one thing to understand a lot of it intellectually and you know, you see an article that you don't like or a policy by the government that you don't like.
But when you really see it on the ground, people's lives actually changing because of these things and you know, slaying their dragons. And I'm truly, I'm not a perfect person, but I am definitely a better person for having been on that tour. And then you can sort of stand the former Foreign Minister of Sweden calling your partner a bug, basically. Yeah, well, for you, that was a joke.
But we had that joke for Minister of Foreign Affairs for years. Yeah. Yes. And then we had a psychologist from Toronto writes a book in essence, just telling you about personal responsibility.
Right. If you were to distill it down, I mean, it's a brilliant book, but really he's saying it's your life, fix your life so that you can live the most flourishing thing possible. So you can accomplish as many of your dreams and goals as you want. I mean, that's the essence of it.
Yes, but to the Swedish system that is anathema because they want the citizens to outsource all their personal responsibility, the love and care for their family. Yeah. So well, that's why being in Sweden was so interesting because I heard this idea from you that, you know, we hear all the time from our left here from the Bernie AOC crew. We hear this idea that, oh, if we were only more like Sweden, it's always, we're always more like, they want to be like, old and Nordic countries, but really Sweden.
We could just be more like Sweden. They do everything right, socialize medicine and all of these things and it's all right. You know, see, it works. None of them have been to Sweden.
None of them talk about any of the issues that you guys are talking about in Sweden. None of them talk about why social justice workers haven't given up in Sweden. If socialism is so right, you know, a place where you have total egalitarianism and men and women are totally equal and yet we still find they do different things. Well, I mean, social justice warriors won't even let you have that.
No, you know, they need to enforce the utopia. Yeah. Yes. Look, the anos had to kill a lot of people, right?
Yes. They had to take out half the universe to accomplish his utopia. And that's really what these people ultimately will do. I mean, there's a reason that socialism and communism comes with a lot of dead people where capitalism doesn't come with a lot of dead people.
Capitalism is about freeing as many people as possible to do what they want with some pretty, you know, pretty, I would say, wide parameters on what you can do within that. You know, you can't murder all sorts of people. You can't do really horrific things and are there some kind of crony capitalism and are there some things that are not perfect? Of course, but there's no perfect system because the systems come from us and we're not perfect.
Yes. So they see it down thing. They believe that if only they had all of the power, they could just show us what's right. And that's it's incredibly dangerous.
And the idea that that now has clearly taken root for you guys over the last couple decades, I suppose, and for us, that it really now feels like in the last five years that these terrible ideas have been mainstreamed where it's almost like what we're going to end up with in the election seems more and more like it's going to be a Trump Bernie capitalism versus socialism really is what it will be to still down to. That's pretty scary and depressing. Well, my questions were in a certain order that you sort of turned them around already. I mean, that's so good.
You know, so you can just turn your notebook upside down and we can see what you do the other way. Because this is election year, right? Yeah, that's what they tell me. Yeah.
So what's the count of the candidate on the Republican side, right? Yes. Well, I'm sure there's going to be some sort of never Trump, you know, want to be nobody that nobody cares about this guy Mark Sanford, who was the governor of not Virginia. He was the governor of something in South Carolina.
I think he stepped down into space. He was cheating on his wife. He says he's going to run as a Republican or something. Nobody cares.
But yes, so obviously it's going to be Trump in the midst of probably still being impeached, which is a complete absolute partisan sham. So let's just be very clear about that. So for your audience that's in Sweden, I mean, basically half of the house half of Congress, all Democrats went for impeachment. No Republican did.
This is the idea that you'd have an impeachment where one party is deciding to take out the duly elected president that is so counter to the founding documents. The whole point is that the three branches of government, the executive branch, the presidential branch, the legislative branch meeting the house Congress and the judicial branch, they have checks and balances, but not to be have one of them be politicized. You know what I mean? I have a decision made purely on political partisan grounds.
So the idea that they're running with this impeachment thing and now Pelosi is not even handing it over to the Senate because she knows it will never pass in the Senate. And the Senate is the only only check and balance that can sort of do an impeachment, right? Well, right. So the Senate now would have to basically vote and decide on what the house just passed in a total Democrat fashion.
They passed it with all Democrats. Now, the idea is you're supposed to pass handed off to the Senate and the Senate is supposed to look at the evidence and decide they know they'll never get it passed. So she's not even handing it to them. So we live in this really bizarre, dirty time where it's like almost every one of the Democrats that are for this for a completely partisan impeachment.
You can find video of them 20 years ago saying the complete reverse thing when it was their guy Bill Clinton and Republicans were trying to do a more partisan impeachment. So, but look, more than anything else related to the election, if you ever wanted to ensure that every Trump voter that voted for him last time is going to show up again because, you know, a lot of times, you know, you don't vote the second time around or maybe there's something about Trump that they don't like or they're just kind of over the whole thing. So they wouldn't vote if you want to ensure that they all show up. You impeach the guy.
The entire base is going to show up. And then, you know, there's also just a lot of people who I think don't like the political games. So even if they're not Trump supporters, they just don't like the idea of what seems very much like a sham impeachment. And I think that's going to push more people to vote for Trump.
And then on top of everything else, I think that the economy is doing pretty well. Believe it or not, despite what happened in Iran, pretty recently we're not doing extra wars. He's trying to get us out of Afghanistan. I'm possibly a rock, no.
He's trying to get us out of Iraq. He's trying to get other countries in NATO to actually pay for things. Black unemployment at an all time low is bad unemployment at an all time low. I mean, there's so many good markers right now that if you can get over the Trump derangement part of this, which a lot of people can't get over, to me, it seems like he's going to win in the landslide.
I mean, I think it's going to be like a Reagan reelection-type landslide. And this is just, it's a sad moment, I would say, for the Democrats because they've chosen, they've made it clear. They're going to go down with the Democratic socialist. So I think the Democratic party, the real story here is not Trump being reelected.
It's that the Democrats have decided to trade in whatever a decent Democratic set of ideas was for Democratic socialism. And by the way, the Democratic part of that will be gotten rid of pretty quickly. They're just coming from a country that calls itself a social democracy. And as you know, we don't really have freedom of speech.
So there you go. They call themselves Democratic socialists. You guys call yourselves a social Democrat. But the social Democrats, they're doing it the other way.
But in essence, they don't really care about democracy. They want top-down power. And that's what we're all fighting right now. So the cool thing is that you've got conservatives, you've got libertarians, you've got classical liberals, disaffected, lefties.
Pretty much everybody has sort of lined up in this very strange alliance right now against the woke progressives. Now, they have a lot of institutional power. They have Hollywood. And we can look out this window.
They have all of this. They have the media. They have the New York Times. They have all the gated institutions and all that.
But we've got momentum. And we've got people. It's interesting that you say the word momentum. Because do you think it will be Bernie who heads up the Democratic side?
Well, look, Biden was brought in purely to be the firewall against the socialists, right? Biden, if he wanted to run, he would have run when Obama was done with the two terms. Biden would have run. He was four years younger.
He could have continued the Obama legacy. All of those things. He didn't because he didn't really want to run. And I think what happened was suddenly they were like, Holy cow.
Hillary's not going to do it again. We've got nobody. Who are the centrist Democrats? You know, there were good Democrats.
John F. Kennedy was a good Democrat, right? That's not what your country can do for you, that's what you can do for your country. That is a good principle to have as a citizen and a free society.
That's the reverse of what Bernie says. If Bernie was ever to say, ask what you could do for your country? He said what your country could do for you? No, he says, we should give you a lot of crap.
All the time. They would hang him for saying that, right? We had great senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan in New York. We had mayors like Ed Koch that were good centrist Democrats.
Now you may want to be more libertarian than them. You may disagree. But you thought that these were principal people who love their country. I don't think that Bernie really loves this country.
I think that Bernie loves an idea of a country that he could create that would probably be a lot more like Sweden, although he doesn't realize that. How many people are in Sweden? It's like what? 10 million or 10 million?
We have a country of about 350 million people from all walks of life. They do that comparison and they make it sound like it's so simple. It's like, we should be more like Sweden than it should be like that. It's like, no, we have so many different things.
Not only the fact that we are the last remaining superpower and just the amalgamation of people that we've brought to be in this melting pot. It's just such a unique case in the United States. I don't think they fundamentally love this country. They love the idea of a country that they can create.
And by the way, they say that all the time. Remember, even Michelle Obama, she said that she was never proud of the United States until her husband was president. And that's like, oh, really? Because we've done a lot of good here.
And everyone still wants to come here. Nobody wants to leave here. But even Obama has woken up now and told off the left-hand side. Well, Obama's doing like a real shady move here.
Because one week he gets it and he's fighting identity politics and the next week he'll say, more women have to be empowered because women will save the world. And he keeps doing this thing where he vacillates back and forth. And in a way, I don't blame him because it's a self-preservation in a certain respect because Obama's not going to get for as left and progressive as and say liberal as Obama may be. Obama ran the first time against gay marriage.
He was against gay marriage. Now, the progressives of tomorrow are going to hate the progressives of today because they're always progressing. But they never tell you what they're progressing to. Progress just for the sake of moving is not good.
You want to have some blend of, we've done some good things here. We want to conserve some of these things. And you can't just say, well, I'm just going to progress forever. You've got to know where you're going.
And what I think Obama is doing every now and again when he tries to check them is he knows the progressives of 2040 are going to look back at an Obama presidency and go, let me get this Obama ran against gay marriage that homophobic bigot. I want his library in Chicago taken down. And I think he's very aware of that. And I think he sort of created a little bit of the monster with the progressives.
And now he's trying to check them. But by the way, now you've got things like the Washington Post calling him a conservative. Because if you take any position that is outside of the accepted woke narrative, now you're conservative. When they say conservative, that's the nice thing they can say about you.
Because usually they say that means you're far right or all right or all right adjacent or the rest of it. So really what's happening here and the reason I'm hopeful is that the left is basically purging all of their free thinkers. If you don't take their position on literally everything from eight and a half month abortions to reparations to anything else, you're all of those awful words and you've got to be booted. What that does is it creates a real interesting fertile situation for people on the other side to go, all right, let's talk it out.
So people on the right now, there are people that are very for, you know, the strike on Soleimani, right? So there are people that are very for that. And then there's the more libertarian side of the people on the right, say the Tucker Carlson's, who are completely against it. But they're not trying to kill each other.
They're actually having a battle of ideas as you're supposed to. Right? And Tucker's been probably Trump's biggest supporter on cable news. Yeah, he's really attacking Trump right now.
That's healthy. That's healthy. They're not saying we can't be Republicans. We can't be conservatives.
What do we want to do with our powers, Americans? How do we secure our country? What is our foreign policy, all those things? That's very rich on the right right now.
There's really none of that on the left. So what I do think if I had the prediction game is harder, it ain't fun, right? I don't see a real way that Sanders doesn't win the nomination because Biden is not mentally capable of doing this. I don't think he has the energy and it's sad.
I don't mean that. I actually, it's sad watching him when he can't finish a sentence and he seems confused and he doesn't know what state he's in and he now says things that he was completely against. I mean, the litany of things that they had him saying the complete reverse 20 years ago, and to be in a politician for a long time because they can always catch on what you said 20 years ago about impeachment or about anything else. But it's like the Democrats brought Biden in to be the adult.
They saw, holy cow, we are this close to becoming socialist. And they thought, who is there? And Biden was basically the last guy. And they thought, let's bring in old Biden to see if he can fix this.
But Biden, he doesn't believe in what has made him good, let's say, for all of these years. So they do the quality form, the LGBT quality form. And Biden literally says, if you go to jail, it's not your birth gender that should decide what jail you go to. It's whatever gender you identify as.
All right. You don't have a lot of male rapists and women's prisons. So it's like they brought him into fight wokeness. But it's such a mind virus that even he, the guy who was supposed to be the adult in the room, is now succumbing to it.
So I don't think he has, I just don't think there's any energy behind him. There's no enthusiasm behind him. And it almost seems like everything's being positioned so we get this grand battle, you know, sort of like a star wars. Yeah.
Yes. And Bernie would be the good, the light and verse, the dark and the whole thing. And who is who? Trump's like, we became the like, what a planet.
What a word is it. The reason I said it's interesting that just like the government, you know, the group behind Bernie is justice Democrats, right? Yeah. And that's Ilhan Omar, Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, I miss pronounce that on purpose.
Right. And they as far as I can tell, they want collective bargaining, Green New Deal, and gender type in protectionism, right? What I call antisemitism. Yeah.
It ain't good for the Jews. You can definitely say that. If Bernie wants to know what his policies will lead to, I suggest he visits mountains, Sweden, because now there's practically no Jews left there. Yeah.
Well, look, this is, I mean, you know, there's so many things to talk about with this, but you know, relative to what's happening, you know, we've seen this like surge of antisemitic attacks in New York and it's all coming from lefties. Yes. And it all makes perfect sense because Jews are a minority that is successful. That does not fit with their world narrative.
They only like minorities that are unsuccessful or marginalized or something else. So the choice for Jews is either be successful, live the life you're supposed to live freely and be hated or be liked and basically be killed, right? So they'd be all, if the Nazis were in power in Germany right now, American lefties would be all about the Jews. They'd be like, oh my God, they're being oppressed and all that.
Because nothing that they do is actually based in what's human and good. It's based in these power structures that don't make sense. So that's why Jews have had to be thrown under the bus. And by the way, it's not just Jews that are doing this too.
I mean, Asians have been thrown under the bus. Harvard now openly discriminates against Asian people. So if you are Asian, it is harder to get into Harvard than even for a white person because they had too many, too many Asian people there. So they're the ones that are injecting systemic racism into the system.
You know what I mean? And I get it. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. They want to help minorities.
But every time you help them, if you help somebody artificially, you have to punish somebody else. And why should some 18 year old Asian kid who potentially is a first generation immigrant or third generation immigrant whose parents maybe owned a vodega or a little corner shop and worked very hard to come here and everything else who studied, did all the right things. Why should that kid be punished just because of his ethnicity? This is now what the left is offering.
And that's why it's bad for the Jews. It's bad for every minority. And usually when bad things come, it comes for the Jews first. That's just the bargain that Jews have been left with.
But it is interesting because these three things also, by the way, the faction that got Corbin elected to have labor in England, they were called momentum. And they have the same production handbook as Justice Democrats. The same three policies, collective bargaining, green, new deal, intersectionism. Well, the silver lining of this is that Corbin took a pretty bad loss and will no longer be the head of the party and labor got pretty obliterated and all that.
So if that's a sign, and by the way, there's been a pretty big swing in elections all over the world that have started to lean right. We've had a whole bunch of this over the last couple of years. So that is a good sign if you basically care about freedom, if you basically care about nation states, if you care about capitalism and the rest of it. But these guys will not give up.
And by the way, they want political violence. I mean, the Democratic convention is going to be violent. I guarantee it was violent last time, although the media barely reported on it because they wanted to make it seem like Trump supporters were the violent ones. But it's going to be violent.
And what they've done is they wanted to destroy the apparatus of the Democratic Party. And they did it. They did it already. I mean, no one's really talking about it.
But the Democratic Party in any sort of functioning, what we used to call blue dog Democrats, moderate Democrats. So a Democrat that might say, you know, I don't love abortion, but I'm pro-choice and, you know, one after one drymaster, you can't have a abortion. That used to be a pre-moderate stance. I think most people believe in something like that.
But now we've literally got it to the point where they're talking about post-birth abortions. I mean, that quite literally they're talking about post-birth abortions. So you can abort your child up with it? I'll put it 40 or when they can support themselves.
Yeah, my parents can abort me now because of my political beliefs. No, I mean, really, they're talking about, well, if the baby comes out and the doctor says, oh, it's going to have this hell problem where it can't, you know, it's crazy. Really, really crazy stuff. But that tells you a lot about generally the mentality of a leftist.
And I say this is someone that was on the left for most of my life. If your whole worldview is just based on what you feel is right on any given moment. You don't know exactly why it's right. You don't know where rights really come from.
But you kind of just feel that things should be a certain way. You can be moved to do almost anything. And that's why socialism and communism are so dangerous because they kill people because they believe that their system is the only thing that can work. Generally, not the conservatives are right about everything because I don't believe that they are.
I don't think anyone has a total monopoly on truth. But a general conservative belief is that it's your life, individual rights that we should all be treated equally under the law. And then some of us are going to work harder. Some of us are going to have more luck.
Some of us are going to come from more. Some of us are going to come from less. But that's the idea of individual rights in and of itself. That's sort of a bedrock principle that the right has right now that the left doesn't have.
They just sort of feel like, ah, I kind of feel something today. And that's what we have to move on that. And that's sort of the, ah, this is very depressing for me to say. But that to me is the weakness of liberalism.
As someone that still considers myself a classical liberal, liberalism almost doesn't have a defense mechanism against its worst, the worst parts of the left. And I think that's what the socialists saw. The socialist saw, how do we get in on this? Getting on it, how do we get into the system, right, the bigger world wide system?
Get in through the liberals because liberals are nice, liberals are tolerant, liberals are decent, liberals love diversity. We'll use all of their words and we'll use all of their phrases and we'll just kind of wiggle in and then we'll just eat them from the inside. And I think that's what's happened, which is why there's so few good liberals anymore, which is pretty depressing thought as a lifelong liberal. Yeah, no, I understand completely.
So do you think Bernie Sanders, by the way, knows who he's hanging out with? Yes, do you think he bears ill will? That's why I'm asking you. Do I think he bears ill will?
Because I mean, I come from a country that's socialists. My family is Jewish. All of them are voted socialists or on the left. And I mean, if you won't liberal in Sweden, you would consider it as socialist liberal party.
So it's pretty lefty. Right. And I don't see any of them, not that they've told me, but I don't see any of them voting for the socialists in the coming election because Jews in Sweden are pretty much fucked. Yeah, yeah.
Well, there was a huge anti-Semitism problem with the Labour Party in the UK. And then as we just talked about it, I mean, Corbyn got demolished. So these trends... But Sweden is different.
I mean, I've written a book about it. I want to learn Swedish. I'll give you a PDF for the English. But basically the Swedish welfare stage, the Swedish social democrats supported Hitler with arms and money up until the end of the war.
And official Swedish history says we were neutral during the war. Maybe it had a bit more on the Nazi side up until 43. And then Hitler started losing and you had to switch side if you were really a good person. So the official story in Sweden is still, yeah, we were neutral.
But up until 43 we were a bit more neutral on the Nazi side and then afterward we were a bit more neutral on the Allies side. But the truth is, as I write in the book and have proof of now, is that they were on Hitler's side up until the end of 1944. And then when Washington called them here for discussions about reparations, the first thing they negotiated was that it shouldn't be called reparations, voluntary donations. And then they didn't really want to give back the money to, for instance, Belgium and Holland, whom Hitler had robbed and sent the gold to Sweden to buy arms.
And since they never really dealt with that history, because socialists don't like history that portrays them as bad. They also don't like voluntary, which tells you a lot about why you use that phrase, you know, voluntary, right? It's like even with our discussion about reparations here in the United States right now, which I'm completely against, it's like all of these people that are for it, all the celebrities that are telling us we should be for reparations and all the democratic candidates that, well, they don't donate anything. You guys are allowed to do it.
It's so righteous guys. Why don't you show us? Don't tell us. Show us a little something, a little something.
Bernie's screaming about affordable housing for everybody. He does it three houses. We have to do many of the things that they preach. I mean, that's a consistent, uh, consistent thing that comes out of the left, all of the time.
You know what I mean? We're even right now all of the policies, none of the policies make any sense. So we're going to have $15 minimum wage. Go to any fast food place right now.
What's happening? You've got iPads everywhere. We're just replacing humans. So they're going to artificially tell businesses how much they have to pay people.
And then at the same time businesses are just like, okay, more iPads, more iPads, more iPads. No humans. So it's like, for me right now, I have a small, profitable, functioning completely in the black business. I'm very proud of my business.
I pay a hundred percent of my employees' health insurance. We treat everybody great. very fair wages blah blah blah. What right would the government have to say that, Dave, if you're going to hire a new production assistant, you have to pay them $15 an hour.
Now, I pay my guys all really well. Most of them well above what their market value would be because I wanted to bring in great people and I want them to be with me for the long haul. But I have quite literally hundreds, if not thousands of emails, of people offering to work for me for free or for next to nothing. If I wanted to do that, what right does the government have to come in and say, no, no, no, Dave, even though someone wants to work for you for free or they've agreed to do it for $7 an hour in their high school kid who's just going to take pictures at your studio, you know, no, no, you have to pay them $15 an hour.
And she comes out a few months ago and she said, no, it should be $20. And it's like, well, actually she's right because if you're just making up numbers, well, right do you, Bernie, have to say it should be $15, it should be $20, and then why not $25 and the rest of it? And that again goes to how they used the goodness of liberalism to infect the system. They used the good intentions of liberals to help people, to now create a series of horrific policies that make no sense.
Last time I had you on the show, I wanted to ask you what you thought the root cause of this was. My book is my answer, but you're writing a book now as well. Yeah, so it's done. It's done.
So whatever I say now, can't be altered. No, so what's the name of your book? So the book is don't burn this book, thinking for yourself in an age of one reason. I was going to show you an image there, but we'll deal with that.
Later, I'm really proud of it. I've given it, well, you know, as an author and yours is a little more dense than my 256 pages about the same. Mine is only 460. You're 660.
I mean, this is a dense, I will read the PDF, but you're going to have to give me about, you know, you're going to have to do it. But I don't have to tell you that writing a book is completely different than talking. It's completely different than performing or speaking or lecturing or any of those things. But didn't you enjoy it?
I really did enjoy it more than I thought I was going to enjoy it. But it also comes with, you know, a lot of days, literally I'd start the day, have my coffee, walk my dog, and then just lock myself in a bedroom, one of the green room, one of my bedrooms in my house, because my studio's in the house, the green room that you've been to, is also my office. My office and a bedroom and the green room, it's a multi-purpose room. And I basically lock myself in from about 8 a.m.
Usually till about 1 or 2 p.m. Usually not even eat anything, just coffee and water and just right, right, right, right, right, right, right. And I had a friend actually in the UK who I would bounce a lot of ideas off of and we'd wrestle with things and really try to really extrapolate the most truth we could out of it. It's like squeezing an orange sort of, just get the most out of it as you can.
So I can enjoy the process, but as you know, it's also kind of painful. Pleasureable. But yeah, it's pleasurable. Right, I mean, that really is what it is, right?
Because you have to, it also makes you, for me at least what I realized was, there's something about print, like actual print that people are going to walk around with this. You're going to see people at the airport with this. Or you're going to just see the book at the airport. You're going to know that they're talking about this on a TV show or something that makes it all feel more real and immortal and here, versus YouTube videos, which seems sort of amorphous or podcast things that just go out to the universe, or something like that.
So that's why I really wanted it to feel like I just gave it everything I had. And I think it's the right blend of ideas and humor and some silly stuff and a little bit personal stuff. But to answer your question, which is what the root of all of this is, what would you say all of this? You mean just sort of what leftism is, like what socialism is?
It's crazy in us, which is crazy in the Western world, yes. So the root of all of that is we're in the midst of basically what the endless battle of humanity is, which is authoritarianism versus libertarianism, right? So it's just that for ages and for millennia and for the beginning, since the beginning of human history, what humans have fought is to be free versus people that want to control them. That's the battle.
That is the only battle. You know, people argue about taxes, they argue about all these little policies, and it's like, that's not really the battle, guys. It's the thing that's beneath it. So the battle is authoritarianism versus libertarianism.
The reason that the terrible ideas of the left now, the socialist Democrats or the Democratic socialists, the woke brigade or whatever you want to call them, the reason that they've taken root in the West, I think in the last, let's say 20 years, where really, especially in the last 10 years and five years where now it's on steroids, and now everyone sees it. But the reason it's sort of been a recent thing is that the West, through capitalism, through freedom and free markets, and all of these things has created so much unprecedented freedom, so much ability to live how you want to live, that we sort of got bored of all of it. We can't even see the goodness anymore. We can't see the forest for the trees.
We can't see that capitalism brings more people out of poverty. And yes, you're going to have billionaires. You will have billionaires. But you know what?
Your poor people, your poor people in a capitalist society are immeasurably wealthier than poor people in a socialist society. And what's happened is lazy thinking has infected almost everything as we become more successful. Instead of really thinking about things and reading books about things, we've let terrible ideas leak into academia. We've let ideas, you know, Douglas Murray, who I know about, I think is one of the greatest thinkers who's really dissected a lot of this.
One of his great, both of his books, and the last one, Madness of Crowds, I think is a spectacular, you know, it's funny, I was reading Madness of Crowds as I was writing my book and I kept thinking, I need to be a better writer because this guy is just such a, you know, he's got the British name too, he's just brilliant. But when I had him on the show, one of the things he said is, we are now debating things that we long know are true. We're suddenly debating them and we're now no longer debating things that we should be debating. And then the other part of this is that as all the bad guys are coming, the barbarians are going to be at the gate and we're going to be debating what gender they are instead of why they're at the gate or can the gate hold or the rest of it.
So because we've sort of gotten fat on our freedoms, we don't know what they are anymore. We don't understand why that the First Amendment in the United States, the government cannot come for your free speech. I'm pretty sure you guys would love to have that in Sweden. I know that is one of my political goals.
I want to go back to doing dick jokes. And I will do everything in my power to ensure that becomes a reality. Thank you. But I mean, think about that.
So you live in Sweden, which by and large is a free society, by most... Until they come for you, yes. Until they're there at the door there. But basically a free society, right?
But here you are in the United States. You know you can say things here that you cannot say at home. That is a pretty profound, scary, but also inspiring thought. But we have the First Amendment.
We have the Second Amendment, which defends the ability to have the First Amendment. We have the Fourth Amendment about privacy. We have these incredible freedoms here. And we're suddenly debating whether we should be free or whether we should just pick people that have never done anything.
Bernie Sanders has never accomplished anything. He's never hired anybody. Becoming a politician and running a campaign is not an impressive skill set. Has he ever run a business?
Has he ever had to make executive decisions? He's not the executive. He's the executive. He's the executive.
The president is the executive. So what we've done is we've just... It's all easy answers because we've become fad on things and we all have Netflix and we all have... We're running around on TikTok pretending we're oppressed while we have more power in our hands than it is...
Than quite literally could have been humanly imaginable 20 years ago. And we've become fad on these ideas. And then they just... The socialists and the...
The Woksters and all these bad people, they infected the system because they realized, whoa, these capitalists are so fad on it that they'll just easily go down with some bad ideas. And so I think the answer to your question is it's not rocket science saying that it's just people who want power. But if you think about it, why do the Islamists love the progressives? Islam is basically the most regressive set of ideas.
Why do they love progressives? Are they really for gay marriage? Are they really for abortion? Of course they're not.
But the reason they love the progressives is the progressives want power. And what Islamists want power. So they're just going to be the last ones to be beheaded. And this is sort of what's happening with Bernie.
So when you ask me about Bernie's intentions, he's around some really horrific people. Ilhan Omar, Linda Sarsori is a true anti-Semite. I don't run around calling people anti-Semites. I live in the greatest society in the history of the world.
And for although the hate crimes against Jews is by far the most of any minority, this is not an anti-Semitic country. This is the safest place for Jews to live in some ways, even safe for the Israel. That's how insane everything is. But Bernie has surrounded himself with horrific, horrific people.
And the reason he does it is because he wants power as a socialist and some of them want power either as Islamists or whatever their other toxic ideologies are. The beauty of this, and I sent a long thread at the beginning of the year about my prediction for this year. And I do think this is the year that it all implodes, is that this competing interest of black people versus white people, rich people versus poor people, men versus women, gays versus straight, it can work for a while. It's worked for these last few years.
But beneath it, beneath it's exterior that looks kind of good, it all sort of feels right. Oh, you should hate rich people and white people or even like these blanket statements that are just nonsense. But they kind of, if you don't want to think about things, they kind of seem right. Beneath that, the skeleton of this thing is seriously weak.
It is really, really weak. And that's the part that all of us have to just remember. This competing interest, you know, there's a Decepticon hat over there. You said it wasn't your hat.
But you know, Transformers from the 80s or the horrible Michael Bay movies, they had the Constructicons. These were five trucks that all combined to form Devastate or a much bigger, powerful Decepticon. That's the way they think. They think they can take people with five different set of ideas and combine it to something more powerful.
Really what they're combining into is something that's going to have a really, really weak skeleton beneath it. And I think that's why we will watch this thing implode. And that's why here we are in Hollywood just two or three days after Ricky Gervais just set this town on fire by telling them, basically telling them all to go eff themselves. Yes.
So, I told you, I said, oh, Greta Thunberg got a shout out. You're very happy about that. You're greatest expert, by the way. Yes, but that's what happens when socialism fails in every other way, is that they all run into the Church of Nature because the Church of Nature presents you with a question so complex it is impossible to answer.
So what you do then, you step away and you turn on Netflix and you just distract yourself rather than grapple with these issues. But again, this is why I'm hopeful because now because of podcasts, because of YouTube, because of Twitter, all of these ways we've started to communicate with each other, you know, the veil is being pulled off this thing and people are starting to see it for what it is. And once you really see it, and if you just spend a little time thinking about these issues and go, wait a minute, wait a minute, should I keep more of my money and do what I want with it, whether it's give it to charity or spend it on a car or give it to my kids or do whatever I want to do with my money? Does that make more sense than giving it to the government so it can decide to do things?
And by the way, the whole time, this is the endless irony of what the left offers, which is the government's horrible, everyone's corrupt, we're all evil, the system's evil, what should we do? Give it more money, give it more power. If we are the ones, everyone before us was a schmuck and an idiot, we can fix all of this, even though we have no track record of ever doing anything. And that's why if you really show people this, I don't think it takes rocket science to push people over.
That's why I wrote the book and that's what I want people to understand. And that's why I find it so fascinating talking to people like you and why the tour with Jordan was so great, was because I was on the ground talking to people about these things. And it wasn't through a media filter and it wasn't from reading a New York Times article that made me think a certain way. It was actually from going to the bar that night after the show and sitting with you, and literally 50 or 60 other people having a drink in Sweden, talking about how fearful they were for the future of their country, and that the things that they were talking about were the exact same things I'm talking about in America.
That's pretty powerful. I think you will survive. I'm pretty sure the welfare state of Sweden will not. Because the business of the United States, as far as I can tell, is business.
And business is a good thing. Business is a great thing. Competition is a good thing. Markets are a good thing.
Socialism continually eats itself. Well, the question is really then, if we all believe that, which I think most clear-thinking people do, the question is when it destroys itself. And as I said, I think this is the year it implodes because of the election and the competing interest will come too obvious to bear. The question is, what does it do?
What chaos does it sow in the destruction? And then, if I could loosely quote Jordan here, it would be something like, well, what kind of Phoenix rises from the ashes of that? Does liberalism suddenly return? Because they finally go, holy cow, this socialist stuff is garbage and evil and hateful, and do good liberals magically reappear?
Or does something even worse come after? I mean, you can play that game endlessly, right? Does something worse come after it or what happens after? But I believe it will implode this year.
And maybe the culmination of the implosion is Bernie just getting crushed by Trump. And then finally, they have to go, holy cow, maybe we really misjudged this thing. Maybe we shouldn't have let the kids at the adult table. That would be great.
And I have another question for you. This one will be the last and then you're free to go. So you're a tech entrepreneur now. I didn't have enough on my play, man.
Yeah. But I'm asking because you said, Paul, it's so important because they help with the conversation. And I'm demonetized on YouTube and Shadow Band from time to time on Twitter. And that's in the terms of service now.
I saw you. It is quite literally in the terms of service as of January 1st, 2020 that Twitter can throttle your tweets. Now, we all know anyone that's been paying attention to this in our world. We've known they've been doing this for years.
But now they actually put it in their terms of service and pretty much nobody said anything. So that means that they are telling you we are rigging the game. It's like going to a sporting event, going to a basketball game and then just saying, you know, no matter what the score is at the end, we're tacking on 10 for this team. You know, I mean, they're telling you we are cheating.
We know the algorithms are cheating. We know about deboosting and deranking and all of these tricks that they're playing. But now they're even telling it to us and we're still going, guys, let's keep playing. Let's keep playing.
Everything's OK. So what is locals.com? So I started locals.com. So basically for the last year and a half, you may remember it was just over about 14 months ago when Sargon of Akad who was a big YouTuber.
I lost a shitload of Patreon. So because of that. Right. So there's going to be a happy ending for you here.
And also you should remember I'm a prospective customers of locals.com. So you better sell it well now. I told you there's going to be a happy ending for you. I just put the ending over here.
So about 14 months ago, Sargon of Akad who was really one of the first, I would say classical liberal. I don't know what he considers himself now. But we're really one of the first classical liberal people on YouTube. When I started waking up, say five years ago, what was happening with the left one.
I was on the on Turks and I was left the on the other thing. People started saying, you got to talk to this guy, Sargon of Akad. And that was really when I didn't even know what YouTube fully was. These people that have these monikers and you don't know if it's a real person or it's an anime cat.
But I started connecting with him and I did an interview with him on his show. And I thought, oh, there's something here. There are liberals that are frustrated with leftism and all this. And I went 14 months ago, he was funding his channel through Patreon.
So Patreon for your audience that doesn't know is just a crowdfunding site. So it's a subscription based site. You put in however much you want for whatever creator that you care about. Sargon was on, so he was funding his YouTube channel through Patreon.
He was on another show, on another YouTube show where he said the N word. And he didn't say it to be racist. He actually said it because he was mocking the use of the word by the alt-right. If you actually listen to the context of why he said it.
Patreon decided to boot him from their platform even though he didn't do it on, not only not on his YouTube channel, he didn't do it on Patreon itself. So they decided to punish him on their platform for a word he said, not even on their platform nor the show he was funding on their platform on a completely other thing. And they didn't care about the context or the rest of it. Anyway, that happened and suddenly Jordan Peterson and I, we just decided this week, eventually you have to stand up for things.
You know, we all stand up for things in our life. But this one really struck me as a bridge too far. If they can take this guy out, they can take out anybody. So over the last year and a half, I met with a million tech people.
I talked to all sorts of literally philosophers and tech people and financial people about how we could build a different type of internet. And basically what we've decided with local's outcome is that the internet right now, and this is so consistent actually for all the ideas we're talking about here. The internet right now is completely top down, meaning you've got Facebook, you've got Google, YouTube, and you've got Twitter pretty much as the big companies that control everything and they give us free things. But what they didn't tell us was that the cost was going to be your soul, right?
The cost was going to be your information and everything else. So it's top down thinking you're getting something for free. But then at the same time, we manipulate you, we silo you, we're going to make you hate certain things and a lot of other things. You're going to search for scientists and you're not going to get the proper results because we're going to de-it's not de-boost whether they do.
There's a magical word for it where they... So if you search for top American scientists, by the nature of the work that's been done, something like nine out of ten of them would be white men. It's just how it is. But they...