0:03
hi everyone two announcements before today's bonus episode featuring Dave ruin of the Reuben report first this is a conversation about humor and political correctness so there is some adult language you have been warned second we had some technical issues with Tyler's
0:20
microphone so he sounds a little faint at first but it does get better as you go along so thanks for sticking with us and enjoy the show conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at
0:49
arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com [Music] [Applause] I was talking to my law and literature Class A few days ago and I told them I would be doing a podcast with Dave Rubin and it's striking that everyone in the class but one person knew who he was so if you think about today's world if you
1:19
have a well-known YouTube channel or a well-known podcast it's actually more intellectual influence than most television shows if you think in terms of VI ship but also if you think in terms of quality of viewership or who is likely to be influential so Dave if
1:36
you've been doing these podcasts you used to have your own radio show presumably you prefer the podcasts what about podcasting as a medium do you find so Dynamic and so useful yeah well first off can I get the name of the kid that didn't know me cuz uh we'd have to take
1:51
care of that um yeah well now all right he knows me now so that that's good uh well first you know I'm I'm really looking forward to this because it's nice being on the other side of the interview every now and again and getting to judge your questions to me the way Twitter judges my questions to
2:07
other people um so yeah I was uh I did stand up in New York for uh for 12 years and I stood on street corners six nights a week for two hours a night for many many years Just in Time Square I'm sure you guys have all been harassed by those people I was one of them and uh and I
2:24
felt that standup it was great but it but it only existed in that room you know you could no m could kill or bomb and regardless people didn't know how to find you after they couldn't remember oh he's the sixth white guy after four hours of whatever middle-aged guy with
2:40
brown hair you can't remember no matter how how funny you were or whatever uh so I I remember thinking like I've got to make a move out of this I've got to figure out something so actually I started a podcast very early on before anyone knew what podcast were I I quite
2:54
literally uh I had a podcast where I did not know how to download download a podcast at the time I I was doing it with my on air partner he know how to do it he said let's let's try this thing and eventually it became so successful I got on Serious XM and uh I was over
3:09
there for a couple years and then that led to to what I'm doing now now on your own that's oh yeah I mean getting on YouTube and and everything in the digital space it's uh it's incredible I mean you can my my policy is I don't care where people listen or where they watch or how they consume it or how much
3:27
they watch some people watch for a few minutes then download the full audio we we put up our our hour and a half long interviews and some people watch that whole thing or listen to that whole thing some people just want five minute Clips uh so to me it's like we create
3:40
something and then however they get it I'm fine with that why is it that so many successful podcasts are relatively long so we've done very well with hourlong podcasts or sometimes even 90-minute podcasts it's counterintuitive you might think the internet you want
3:55
short bits everything should be five or seven minutes yeah the it almost seems the longer they are serial a lot of those episodes are fairly long what's your intuition there yeah well as as we have thinking people in this room and I suspect most of your audience is thinking people I think you'll be happy
4:10
to know that I really believe that there's there's a rubber band effect happening right now we've been so bludgeoned with short form stuff you know Vine or sixc videos and Snapchat and Twitter's 140 characters and and this endless assault on on thinking because you can only have this tiny
4:29
chunk to say anything so I actually think in the last I think it's really started in the last year or so there's really a movement people are willing to give you their time if you give them something good so conversations like you have and and like cereal and a bunch of
4:43
other things they're allowing people to to stop the noise because I think that's what's happening you know people even when I was on the flight here I was watching the guy next to me on his iPad just go through his Facebook feed and it's half you know political stuff and
4:57
half babies and and half cats that's three rehabs but it was just a long feed and and people are just inundated and they don't know where to put their attention so I think a certain amount of people are finding long form now and uh as I always say it's not rocket science
5:12
what we're doing but I think it's actually it's rare these days I think a lot of it is about going to the gym so when I was young everyone played tennis or even believe it or not racketball uh and if you're doing that you can't really listen to much while you're playing but if you go to the gym
5:27
you go to the gym often for about an hour or a bit more than an hour you're typically doing something solo you're bored out of your mind and you want something to listen to and you don't want to be changing podcasts every five minutes you get into some kind of Rhythm
5:41
yeah and you actually listen it's the closest thing we have to a captive audience and then there are commutes which because we don't price the roads at rush hour because we don't listen to economists many of those are about an hour long so you get your podcast listen
5:54
to in your commute yeah and people who go to the gym and people who commute if you think of them demographically Al they are much more influential and better educated than average I think well think how beautiful it is I mean every single one of you have a device in your pocket you can you have access to
6:09
the world right right then and there and I I talked to next week we're doing a fan show on my show which I do every six months I'm interviewing 20 fans from 20 different countries uh so we'll be talking to people you know from from Africa to North America to South America
6:24
and everywhere else and I do 20 in a row and it's it's incredibly rewarding that people are connected over these ideas and and yes there's diversity in in color and religion and things like that but it's really about diversity of thought which is number two for listenership Country number two is
6:40
uh is the UK so it's the US UK Australia and then Sweden which is really interesting because there's a lot going on there right now and they're having all sorts of issues related to free speech and then Believe It or Not number five according to YouTube is Saudi Arabia which um I'm actually very proud
6:55
of because it means we're making a dent in a place that's a pretty closed Society and do Saudis write to you about what you're doing oh yeah I get I get emails literally from all over the world what kind of anecdotal feedback do you get from countes other than the normal
7:09
you know I mean the most interesting ones are the closed Society so so a lot of the the countries in the Middle East where there are free thinkers who for the first time are able to to find other people to connect with uh so I mentioned in one of the panels yesterday that sort
7:23
of my Awakening to what was happening here related to free speech and what was happening uh with my my former colleagues on the left most of them won't talk to me anymore uh was was the night that Sam Harris was on Real Time with Bill Mah and got into this big
7:36
fight and and the quote that everyone grabs from that is that he called uh Affleck called Sam and and Bill gross and racist uh I had a guy on my show who's a atheist in Egypt who wanted to do my show uh he has a little YouTube channel but he doesn't show his face on
7:51
his channel and he said he reached out to me said he wanted to do my show and I said look if you want to wear a Spider-Man mask and do it if that if that'll keep you safe go ahead uh and he said no he wanted to show his face and he came on and he told me that his political Awakening was that same night
8:06
because he saw the clip on YouTube and that's an incredibly powerful thing I mean we live something like you know we live literally half the world apart and we're having Awakenings over ideas and it's only because YouTube and all of this exists you know I've had people
8:18
from Nigeria write me about my podcast but for some reason it gets sent to the spam filter I don't are they a prince they want some money from you just give them the account and figure yeah now another Innovation you've been behind is the notion of crowdfunding your own activities you've been very successful
8:35
with this could you tell the audience a little bit about how that's worked for you yeah so crowdfunding actually has been the greatest Freedom that that I could possibly imagine uh so we started my show uh don't boo immediately but at first I was with The Young Turks which
8:49
is a a progressive or regressive in my view uh online news network and we were with them for for about a year and a half uh and then I moved over to AA TV which is Larry King digital Network and that's really where the show took off and I was talking to people like Sam Harris and and ion and
9:06
uh and all sorts of people and that's where the show really uh hit its Mark and after about nine months I realized we had sort of grown to the point and I and I was getting so much email from all over the world and people saying that they they were feeling something about
9:20
these conversations that we were having that I thought we could we could do this independently uh so there's a site that some of you may be familiar with called patreon uh and basically my audience you can give a dollar a month uh which you get like you know you get a newsletter you can give $25 a month you
9:35
get a t-shirt you can give uh a $100 a month I do a small group chat with a couple people so a little video group chat uh if you give $500 a month I do a one-on-one with you for 15 minutes and and all sorts of different tiers uh and they they fund us to about $30,000 a
9:50
month and it's about 4,000 people that do it and uh and it's beautiful because the truth is I don't know you know my audience is is hugely diverse in terms of politics and they could really never sway me anyway because I don't know really what they think I communicate
10:05
with some of them but it's truly a way to be intellectually free now consider comedy and politics some people have the common view that the major comedians out there they're leftwing there's C there's John Stewart it might seem superficially that if you have a sort of anti-establishment
10:23
attitude it's easier to be comic about that Lenny Bruce in the 1960s Richard prior it's easy to be against something and to be funny do you think there's some kind of bias in the medium of Comedy against a mix of libertarian conservative social conservative ideas oh yeah I mean we're
10:40
against the the norm right now I mean look at look at comedy I'm sure I don't have to tell you guys but you could look at I don't want to throw a bunch of people under the bus but I mean look at mainstream comedy right now it's pretty bad yeah there's a couple Lou C and
10:52
Chappelle uh but basically it's they've bought into identity politics so there's just so much of it that they're fighting the wrong people uh they're strengthening the wrong ideas is that going to flip against them because identity politics has a kind of selfs seriousness to it you're not allowed to
11:08
laugh at certain things not supposed to and then you have comedians promoting identity politics won't that at least in the comedy club be self-refuting oh yeah it well it's hugely damaging and you can see it so like Amy Schumer who I think is a perfectly nice person I have
11:21
nothing against her her her Netflix special got terrible reviews because she trades in a lot of that stuff so the the own their own viewing audience turned against it and once they found that out they actually changed their rating system because they didn't want the
11:33
public actually screwing with their with their rating system so they don't do it by Stars anymore which is I think kind of interesting um but yes there there's been a flip look political correctness is the death of Comedy think about it I I would argue that George Carlin is the
11:46
greatest comedian of all time he would literally be banned from campuses right now he would be thought of as an old white patriarchal guy coming around you know telling them these these scary thoughts that that's a huge problem and and that is that is not good it's not
12:02
good for comedy it's not good for society I'm older than you are when I was a kid most of my friends were not allowed to Listen to George Carlin because he was too radical as a smart alec and today you would not be allowed to listen to him yeah because he's too
12:17
much of a patriarch right exactly but really that's that's powerful that's a powerful notion right there and it's true now as political correctness spreads its tentacles do you think it will re much into actual comedy clubs where when I go I still hear some fairly outrageous things being said not by
12:34
everyone maybe you're more likely to hear racial jokes from individuals for minorities or jokes about women from women and so on yeah uh but how is political correctness affecting the inside of the comedy club yeah well you know I'm doing a little less stand up
12:48
now so I'm really only doing gigs maybe maybe once a month or so in the in the clubs just because as I said I can spend more time doing a podcast where I can suddenly reach quite literally hundreds of thousands of people people like that versus a club I can reach you know 20
13:02
drunk people and it has less value um there's no doubt that that everything's shifting and that the political correctness what what's happening is if you know you guys have probably heard about like you know all these memes about Pepe the Frog and and kistan and all of this stuff which a certain amount
13:18
of people on the left would have you believe our our hate symbols or something like that it's actually just a bunch of kids just trying to get a rile out of people it truly that's what it is I mean I'm in this at a very intimate level and I see this where these kids
13:31
literally they send a picture of a frog to a celebrity and then the celebrity then amplifies it and says they're under attack and this really is happening right now and then and then the ADL which I think they mean well they then list this Frog as a hate symbol I mean this is really what's happening right
13:46
now this is comedy but it's coming from not the place you think it's supposed to come from how much do you think comedy is what sometimes called a win or take all market so another way to phrase the question is 20 years from now do you think there will be more more or fewer
14:00
professional comedians you might say for instance well you're on YouTube you're really funny I don't need to go to a comedy club there's this fellow in South Korea Robert Kelly he did an interview he was trying not to be funny doing the interview his two kids ran into the room
14:15
his wife pulled the kids back it created a viral video yeah one of the funnier things I saw all year yeah maybe not a funny guy he was trying to keep it serious so it was hilarious and I can find those through my filters through Twitter through search uh what's the role of a
14:32
professional comedian when in amu's best moment from a guy who isn't even funny go so viral uh well the role is always there because the the commentary on society is always going to be there so the moments like of course I saw that video and it's hilarious and it's in the
14:47
moment and it's and it's a beautiful thing by the way there was an outrage to that because a lot of people were saying that the woman who came in was his Nanny uh because I think she was Asian but it was actually his wife so then that cre so even that just a pure moment of something hilarious happening became
15:02
part of the outrage machine too um but the the role for the for the critic of society it'll always be there but it's just not going to come from the clubs anymore I think I think that that unfortunately it's comedy in its rawest form of standing in front of a group of
15:18
people with a microphone and connecting to them that way it's as beautiful as it gets I mean there's nothing in between you and the audience and there you know it's like painting if you were a great painter uh and you every stroke you had to go was that okay was that okay well that would
15:34
make you kind of crazy as a painter but in standup you have to do it that way every line you have to make sure is funny I have not been funny here today at all I think maybe we have to do something else there's less live music in New York City today than in the 1970s
15:48
is there less Live Comedy um I think there's a there is a little bit less because people are just realizing I mean the simple truth is anybody you got a good idea uh and you can uh open a YouTube account and do it there so people just see less utility for it and I by the way I really think that's okay
16:05
as much as I love standup and I love spoken word stuff and Live Events and things like that I think ultimately if if you can figure out how to get to your people which is why we do what we do then whether you're doing it in front of people or or just in your room I think
16:19
either one's fine and as a comedian are you more of of a gatekeeper in a way that an comedian might have been in an earlier time and let me explain this so if the moments from these amuter like there are hilarious one star reviews on Amazon there are funny tweets there's so
16:34
much funny stuff out there even done by non-funny people if I can just live in the moments I still want comedians but I want comedians I trust comedians who have opinions they're Gatekeepers of opinion they're they're figures and personalities and that in a sense is
16:50
more important than just being funny because just being funny you competing against the moments but the moments don't Supply trust a sense of comfort and even moral guidance do you agree with that yeah well look the the who do we miss right now in America whether you agreed with his politics or not I
17:06
suspect that you know for for this audience that John Stewart was probably a little left for you guys but we miss some voice right now of Sanity that's what we don't have right now and well I guess all right all right but well thank you but uh but we miss that in general
17:21
that there you can get some truth no one wants to be you know what's that uh Oscar wild quote about truth you know if it's not funny they're going to hang you so I completely butchered that but something to that effect uh so you so couching something in in some humor is
17:36
really the only way you can tell anyone truthful anything truthful these days is it hard to stay funny as you start to feel more morally important uh I think I'm probably struggling with that a little bit quite honestly yeah I mean I'm talking about big things I'm talking
17:49
about important things and racism and free speech and all this stuff but I can tell you this when I go to universities and I talk to these kids they want to laugh they really do and and I've tried to bring back my standup into that while we're talking about some seriously heavy stuff because imagine being a
18:04
20-year-old kid right now and consistently told you can't think what you think and if you think differently you're you're somehow racist or bigoted or prejudiced or any of this stuff so they need any outlet and and if if we don't provide it to them then then people with worse intentions than us
18:21
will so in the 1960s much of the left not all of it but much of it they were big Defenders of free speech you were the Berkeley free speech movement these days you have Berkeley possibly Banning an cter or at least telling her she has to come on some other date when she
18:34
can't make it why has the left changed on the speech issue so much to what do you ascribe that Evolution yeah so this this unfortunately is my specialty because I I was part of the left and it's only in the last couple years that you know I really understood what Classical
18:48
liberalism was and that that being liberal has very little to do with being Progressive or part of the left uh the the left and the progressives they' become regressive you know the belief that they have in the collective that you should judge people by these immutable
19:03
characteristics of them being black or gay or Muslim or whatever else it is well you automatically are throwing out the individual you're throwing out the freeth Thinker you're throwing out the The ex-muslim Who maybe wants to talk about the doctrine of Islam which is a
19:17
set of ideas that should be uh critique the way you would critique any other set of ideas uh and this this is actually based in Prejudice which is the irony because there the ones that are constantly screaming that everyone on the right is racist I mean this is what it's become it's become it's it's
19:33
laughable and how ridiculous it's become uh but they constantly are doing that while they're the ones that are actually keeping us in this constant state of judging each other not on our thoughts but on other things so when I do these things I was at University of Arizona
19:49
the other night and there was a girl in a hijab there and she was laughing the same way the the white kid who probably was a republican was laughing and I don't care about any of their immutable characteristics I only care about their thoughts you studied for a year at benan
20:04
University in Israel how did that shape wow you really did you really did your research um how did that shape me well you know Israel is an interesting place because it is it is the size of New Jersey and uh at some point it's about nine miles wide the entire country
20:19
they've got one international airport and a very different notion of political correctness well it's funny I I was there about a year ago and I just tweeted out that I was at a bar and about people showed up that's half the country right there I mean it's a pretty it's a pretty small country but because
20:32
they and I realized what it was they have no tolerance for political correctness because when shit's blowing up all over the place you you simply just can't worry about what's what's politically correct you have to do what actually is correct uh are you more or
20:45
less funny in Israel am I more or less funny in Israel uh well I do a pretty decent Israeli accent and you know it's coming I want T is okay you know if there if it's I'm dealing with an is contractor who built my studio right now which uh if anything can turn you into an anti-semite that's it if
21:03
it's indeed a country where anything can be said uh does that make it harder to be funny that is a certain amount of censorship whether explicit or implicit required for humor to have its Force so you see from totalitarian societies satire has much more power than maybe it
21:20
does in America today yeah well that's a great question because if you listen to the hysterics of the people on the left at the moment they making it sound like Trump is cracking down on everyone's Free Speech now I did not vot I voted for Gary Johnson and I should be judged
21:33
accordingly but uh you know Trump I don't fear the government coming from my free speech at the moment I I simply don't what I fear is the chill factor that we're doing it to ourselves every day we're slowly putting out less information we don't want to be uh defriended with somebody on Facebook and
21:50
we don't want to be attacked on Twitter I get I literally get emails from people that are going through divorces over politics now uh and even just think about that in your own life like there used to be a time I used to know couples and friends that disagreed on things and
22:04
that was it you'd have a drink and you'd have something to eat and and we agreed to disagree and that's it that's becoming increasingly rare uh and I find myself even even though people know what I do I have good friends who I get into crazy arguments with and I always make a
22:18
point of saying you know whatever happens here our friendship is far more important and I and the fact that you even have to say that these days or you have to preface something by you know if you like somebody who's a little out a mainstream think you may have to go well
22:29
I don't agree with everything he says what what a crazy notion that is I don't who do you agree with all the time I don't even agree with myself all the time you know Don Rickles he just passed away at age 90 famous comedian he was famous for insulting people he insulted everyone but often he
22:46
insulted people in ways that today would be hard to pull off could there be a Don Rickles today not I don't think so I I don't think there could be the idea of a Don Rickles there could be but the idea that someone could start these days and walk around this room and go die you're
23:01
a Jew and black guy Hispanic all that stuff it could never fly even if it was hilarious the amount of cred that you know he had years and years and years of of cred building in a politically incorrect age to get there so to start with that I think it would be incredibly
23:16
tough ironically we need that more than ever we need to laugh at some of those stereotypes we need to laugh at some of those differences that's that's the whole point is that if you can't laugh at that stuff man we're we're we're really in trouble now you've been an
23:29
opponent of political correctness but do you feel there are things that we should actually not be allowed to make fun of I don't mean in the law wherever you're going with this the answer of custom and politeness things that people should not make fun of in you can absolutely make
23:44
fun of everything there's simply nothing single I mean you can give me a list of things and I would say there's absolutely everything you're willing to bite the bullet 100% I mean I'm look if you if you truly believe in what free speech is then yes you have somebody
23:59
might say something offensive to you somebody might you know I had a girl at uh when I was at UT a couple days ago there there was a girl in the back um and uh she was a young black girl and she said you know um it would be very upsetting to me if I was walking down the street and someone uh you know
24:15
called me a bunch of names and blah blah blah and what do we do about that and I said you know it's nobody wants to be called bad names nobody wants to be you know talked down to and all that but at the end of the day they're just words it's actually on you how you react to
24:28
these words go ahead and start fighting with them if you want and use your free speech to counter it but there's simply nothing that should be off limits as unless you think I'm afraid to even mention much less think about and I'd like to ask you should X be off limits
24:43
I'm not willing to say x yeah you want to right there there in lies the problem here you want to write it down why don't you write something down here I'll look at it and then see what we can come up with the p word does that the p word p word pedophilia oh yeah you can I mean
24:59
you can make fun of it sure I mean yeah I I don't know I don't have a desire to to to I certainly wouldn't mock this is why it's on you but see victims so one can joke about the topic but to joke about victims a various very bad events sure should there be like a private Norm
25:17
or custom where that is that's on you it's on you I mean that's that's simply the truth do I want some sort of laws or code or even it's simply on you yes I prefer myself to be a a decent human being but at the end of the day look you could look go on Twitter for just a moment and and search some words that
25:35
you don't like and you will see the most horrific things you can I mean things that you truly cannot imagine you will see people saying I'm afraid to comp that search yeah look at my Twitter mentions one day you could see some pretty horrible stuff but you know what
25:48
they have a right to do it they they simply have a right to do it doesn't mean you should do it but you can do it what's the most underrated Star Wars movie ah now now we're into something good the most underrated Star Wars movie is Revenge of the Sith actually which was
26:02
the last of the prequels which I know gets mocked a lot but it's a great political story about giving up too much power to what became the executive branch and then how that then gets flipped and you suddenly are cracking down on all the wrong people there's an incredible political story there that
26:18
unfortunately through some bad acting and and George Lucas not handing off enough there's really some some libertarian stuff in there and and some stuff about about consolidation of power and a lot of interesting political stuff so Star Wars is important to you hugely
26:31
important to me what else from movies literature cultural background has been important to you helping to make you funny but also giving you your ideas I don't mean politics now culture well I would say uh in terms of culture uh I once ate some pop brownies and went to
26:47
go see uh the movie Air Force One and it was sold out it was sold out so that's not the funny part uh it was sold out and I ended up walking into movie contact which was uh Carl San it's one one fiction book with jod Foster and I don't know if you guys remember but there's an incredible opening scene of
27:05
Panorama of the universe and I had eaten some pot brownies with some friends and my mind was blown I mean I mean I was on I was on another planet as that panoramic scene opened and then through that I I love the movie I love the the existential questions it offered and and
27:21
the discussions about science and also there's some interesting stuff about the role of government and what it should pay for in research as opposed to are private and so a lot of cool stuff and jod Foster is amazing but because of that I basically read every Carl Sean
27:33
book and that really opened me up to a lot of a lot of free thinking and a lot of philosophy and things like and those made you more optimistic I think ultimately I'm an optimist which is ultimately the tricky word which yeah at the end of the day I'm an optimist but I think there's a
27:47
lot of there's a lot of bad stuff at the moment you know one of the things that I always say to the kids when I go to the schools is I'm sure most of you guys saw Midnight in Paris the Woody Allen movie and the and the Crux of the movie movie is that everyone thinks that if they
28:00
only lived in another time that that it was important then you know if you lived in some other period that that's when things were really happening but what I say to these kids is you guys truly live in something amazing right now I mean all of you can feel it that's why you're
28:13
all here and you guys all do the work that you do there's something happening right now there is some incredible fertile ground it doesn't mean it's going to go well or it's going to go bad it's up for us to choose and that's why talking to these young people is so important if you tell jokes all day and
28:27
you make people laugh and you interact with them on social media that whole experience on that making people laugh does it make you more or less optimistic about human nature um well social media generally can make part of the package yeah it's part of the package it can
28:43
make you less optimistic I mean it's it's a crazy look all of these things are free right so anyone can get on Facebook everyone can get on Twitter everyone get on YouTu YouTube comments you read comments on a YouTube video I'm sure you have you know how many times
28:55
I've had to call my mom to tell her to stop reading the YouTube comments had to do the same she literally my mom literally uh thought that someone who was using a Bill O'Reilly uh this is before this last whole Bill O'Reilly thing maybe a year ago somebody was using a Bill O'Reilly picture as their
29:11
Avatar and my mom thought that Bill O'Reilly was writing racist things to me on YouTube I mean this is this is yeah was he well actually in retrospect it turned out to be him yeah uh um but but this concept of just everyone you know we're we're constantly getting on their
29:27
brings out the worst in Us in so many ways and by the way I say that as someone who prefaced the beginning of this by saying it's connected us I mean look Twitter and and all of the and having a phone and all this video it literally caused a revolution in Egypt it's changing the world for for good in
29:43
many ways but even look at Egypt I mean Egypt they had a they had a democratic election after they got rid of in effect the dictator that lasted for a year and it was much worse and now they have the Army in charge again so there's it's all good it's all bad and it's really what
29:57
you make of it and what you pull out of it final question you have a very different background from many or all of us most of all being a professional comedian and being so much on YouTube but not only what do you think there is that you might understand about the
30:11
future of Liberty that we would not get that you could communicate to us as an interviewer I just want to say that's a great last question that that's a good one right there um I think probably because I'm so in it with young people like there is something they're feeling something
30:30
right now and I don't mean it purely at the academic level I think existentially they're feeling they they grew up in this crazy time of everybody tearing each other down all the time endlessly it's like we've all been bullied or we were bullies or whatever we all grew up
30:45
with that's fine but the they're they're they're walking around with this in their pocket all the time and then you throw in uh a really terrible job that the mainstream media is doing these days and you throw in fake news and you throw in Trump and they're really having
30:59
trouble figuring out what's true so as I say on my show every week basically I'm doing the best job I can to try to bring them something that's true and people will say to me all the time Dave I trust you I trust you and I'm like well you got to find a lot of other people to
31:12
trust me I'm I'm one guy I'm doing the best I can I certainly make mistakes and I try to correct them when I do but I think they're they're truly feeling an existential squeeze on them that I don't think certainly My Generation didn't feel they they're having trouble grasping what's what's real if we're
31:29
going to Shield them if they're going to go to college to be shielded from the the very ideas and the foundation that they need to go out into society well then we're just we're truly setting them up for for a really depressing life and and probably for not to be overly dramatic but you know the end of of a
31:45
functioning democracy so that's why the ideas of Liberty and individuality and knowing political philosophy knowing why it's your life and you should live it and all of those things that's why it's so important and and we need more of that cuz I see you guys doing it at an
32:00
academic level and I'm doing it in a obviously different way but we have to hit them in every way so that the kids that won't listen to me might might listen to some of these professors and the ones that won't listen to the professors might listen to me Dave Ruben
32:13
thank you very much thank you thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the show