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Dave Rubin
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David de Rossier
Very excited to welcome two very special guests. We have Mr. Dave Reuven here from the Reuven Report. Thank you. I'm Mr. David de Rossier from RealClear Politics. Please welcome our guest, Mr. Rebecca up first.
Dave Rubin
All right, thank you, guys. First, thank you for taking a step back. I normally do this online and I don't see real people except for like frog avatars that are telling me that I'm racist. So could be a little jarring to be around so many actual human beings. As I understand it, not all of you are from the free state of Florida. Some of you live in crazy places like Boston, Massachusetts, that you're under the thumb of Elizabeth Warren. And I can't imagine waking up every morning and having anything to do with that woman. So welcome to Florida, where we are free and happy and tan and good looking and our clothes fit and our genitals match. And it's all very exciting. Yeah. Washington, even worse. Even worse.
Dave Reuven
Yeah.
Dave Rubin
Well, welcome everybody.
Dave Reuven
You're a gentleman. Genitals don't match.
Dave Rubin
Or is. Well, whatever works. Whatever, you know. Anyway, I'm very glad to be here. I'm going to speak for about 10 minutes before we sit down and continue. You can sit, Dave. Enjoy the wine. They asked me to talk a little bit about what's going on in the media. You know, we're all caught obviously in this culture war and it's Democrats, Republicans and liberals, conservatives, and everybody's fighting about everything. But I think the real subtext of what's going on here is that we're in a massive, massive shift in terms of how we get news and how we translate reality. You know, we are often, as my friend Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic book, says, we're all watching the same movie and we're having completely different reactions to it. And that's a really fascinating thing. And I think as time goes on and as the media splits and we all go off in our own different directions, it's something we're really going to have to grapple with as, as a country, as people, as family members and everything else. Because if we can't agree on what is real, then we have major, major problems on the horizon which may be coming either way. So it's interesting. I see various ages in this room. I'm probably somewhere in the middle. I'm 48 years old. It's not that old. It's starting to seem a little old to me, but it's not that old. And when I was growing up, you know, if you cared about the news, if you watch the news, you basically watched ABC, NBC, CBS and it was the nightly news on at 6:30 and you pretty much watched whatever it was, whatever anchor he liked. Whether you like Dan, Dan Akwa, not Dan Akron. Well, let's talk about Ghostbusters. For the rest of Dan Aykroyd, Dan Rather or Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw. I combined Ackroyd, Brokaw, something. Okay, but basically what you got was a very sort of narrow overdin window that in essence for the 22 minutes that the program was on, you know, you pretty much had the same stories, the anchors were kind of the same and maybe the order of the stories changed a little bit. But the bulk of Americans, you know, 300 million Americans or so, basically got the news within the same paradigm. It wasn't too far one way or too far the other way. And everyone was sort of focused on the same stories. That's how it was for a long time. Of course, cable news comes along. CNN is first, then MSNBC and Fox, which launched basically at the exact same time. Things went hyper partisan. We had 24 hour news. Then of course the phone that we're all walking around with our pocket in our pocket comes along. We have Twitter, we have Instagram, we had vine, remember Vine? Six second videos and we had Snapchat and all these other things. And things started speeding up and we all started. And it wasn't necessarily our fault. We all started catering what we were seeing to ourselves. And that was sort of algorithmically based in some sense, but we were kind of doing it to ourselves too. And that leads us to where we are now, where the mainstream media, largely for their own fault, has virtually collapsed. I mean, if I was pulling in the daily numbers that Rachel Maddow was pulling in, I'd probably get into another line of work. And she has millions and millions of dollars and a giant corporation behind her that's pushing. But they lied about virtually everything. Whether it was Russia collusion or it was all the COVID stuff, or if you get the vaccine you're not going to get nor transmit Covid, or whether it was Donald Trump, very fine people on both sides, or whether it was Jesse Smollett was lynched and we could do the laundry list of these things. And they lied and they lied and lied and lied. And they could get away for it, get away with it for a long time. And then something actually did shift, and that, of course, was the Internet. So suddenly, when the mainstream media would be running with Donald Trump said, very fine, people on both sides in Charlottesville, suddenly you could just go on Twitter and see the video. And a sentence later he'd say, but I'm not talking about the white supremacists or the neo Nazis, who I condemn completely.
David de Rossier
Rebecca.
Dave Rubin
Yeah, and I'll take that after. And what that led to was the rise of, I suppose, people like me and people like Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro, and I suppose there's some lefty versions of some of us, but not really, because the media largely became partisan left. It became sort of a piece of the Democrat Party. So we started getting this alt media that was. That was basically, I would say, centrist. It was kind of libertarian. I mean, if you take somebody like Rogan, who is way bigger than CNN and MSNBC combined, this is a. This is a mushroom eating, pot smoking, MMA fighting, like conspiracy theorists, basically floating mushrooms. What are we? But this is somebody who is largely, you know, sort of a default kind of liberal, let live and let live guy who then really, I mean, he didn't support him fully until the day before the election, but in essence is a Trump supporter. And then you could look at people like Elon, who was a lifelong Democrat, and he came along, and you could look at some of the people that Trump has in the administration, like Tulsi and Bobby Kennedy, I mean, with the last name Kennedy, that all of these people who were moderates suddenly all became part of, whatever you want to call it, the MAGA movement in America. First, I would just say wide 10 pro America movement. And that really happened, I would argue, because of the alt media, because a bunch of us saw the opportunity. It was as simple as that. Any of you can sign up for YouTube or you can get on Rumble, or you can get on Locals or Instagram, and you can in essence, do what I do, or you can do what Joe does. And believe me, I think there's more podcasts than people now. I mean, everyone, everyone is doing this thing at this point. But what it started to allow was that Overton window that was very, very narrow during that 6:30pm time slot on the three networks. It opened up a little bit with cable news, and now it's been completely blown apart. And I think that the real challenge for all of us now will be to figure out how do you get news in an honest way? How do you actually sit down with someone who maybe thinks a little bit differently than you or who gets their news from somebody else? And how do you work that out? I was talking to a couple of you before this, and everyone's kind of struggling with this. Everyone has this in their family. You know, you just see the same picture and you see two different things. So as this is happening, it's an incredible opportunity, right? Like, there's an unbelievable. There's a business opportunity, obviously for people like me. There's an. There's an industry that is completely collapsing. I mean, I think the mainstream media really is sort of like, you can picture kind of a dinosaur in the La Brea Tarkins that's slowly sinking at this point, and there's these smaller dinosaurs kind of jumping over it to get to the other side. And I think that's really what kind of the podcasters are. But as we do this, we now have an incredible responsibility to do what's hopefully truthful, pick up where these people drop the ball. And that is the challenge for all of us. But again, I think it's really, in some sense, it's more of a challenge for you guys. You now have to discern who is honest, who is a fair arbiter of any of this. And it's going to completely change. I mean, we're just now on the, the very, very beginnings of the AI horizon and soon. I mean, we're literally working on it right now for my show. We're working on an AI version of me to give the news. Like I'm going to put myself out of business. Like there are so many. And between deep fakes and all of these other things, there are so many things that the world, if you think that the world that I mentioned from 1984 with the three newscast sounds different than the world that we have now, the world in 15 years is going to be completely, unimaginably different than the world that we have right now. So it's incredibly inspiring in some sense, right? Like we're all part of it. So literally, any of you, you all have a phone in your pocket. Something could happen. Well, we're in West Palm. Things are pretty safe and kind of chill out here. Nothing's going to happen. Somebody might go out for, you know, late early bird or something. But, but, but you could be anywhere else. You could be in New York City right now, or you could be at Columbia, or you could be at Harvard when things were a little wackier and you can be out there with your phone, and in essence, you're the newsman now. And that is as legit, I would argue. Actually, it's probably more legit than someone that works at CNN or the New York Times or some of these other places. A really great, very simple example of sort of the fraudulence of all of this is the New York Times Bestseller List. The New York Times Bestseller list. Did you guys know it's not based on sales. It's called the bestseller list, but they have a secret formula that they admitted to about 20 years ago. So when people sell a book, I mean, sales are the most sort of obvious thing that there is. Oh, sales. We know somebody produced something, somebody bought something, we can actually order it. You think you're looking at a sales list, and they actually did it with political reasoning behind it. So they reordered their list based on that. So if a place like the New York Times, all the news that's fit to print, I would argue, is probably all the propaganda that's fit to print. If they're going to screw with their sales lists right in front of you, what else do you think they're screwing with? So as we see that, again, the challenge is pilfering some truth out of the panoply of ideas that are out there, which is challenging, and it's on you. And then it's really seeing what businesses arise. But there's an incredible. For those of you that are in college now or if you're under 30, you have such an unbelievable opportunity to build things right now. America got pretty freaking close to the end. I really believe that, like, had the election gone the other way, we were pretty much there. All of the forces were churning against us. Everything was calcifying against us because it was too much. Right. We had a president with dementia and a woman who no one believed in that was basically installed, and it could have happened. And the election was way closer than people like to think. So we got that close to it. So we have this incredible opportunity right now where, for the first time in a long time, we're winning the culture war. We have technological reasons to believe that we can continue to do that. And. And it's actually a very exciting time, all of the craziness notwithstanding. So I suspect we'll continue discussing the rest of that in a moment. And I thank you guys. Everybody was nodding all along, which is what I like. Thank you, guys. Did you know scammers can literally steal your home right out from under you. The FBI calls it house stealing and it's one of the fastest growing real estate scams in America. Here's how it works. Criminals forge your signature on a single document, slap on a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee and file it with the local recorder's office. Just like that, your home title is no longer in your name. From there they can take out massive loans using your equity as collateral or even sell your home without you ever knowing. 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David de Rossier
So I thought a good question for both of you coming from your respective positions within the media broadly, what do you see as, what do you see are some parallels in the shift of America's perception of the media and then for my side, higher education because there's definitely been, I would say a decline in both where the public you know, would say oh Harvard, you know, with an eye roll and then talk about the establishment media with a similar eye roll. So maybe from, for both, from both of you, what's your perception with Ruben Report and RealClear in terms of how the public perceives, perceives your work?
Dave Reuven
David's been talking the most. Yeah, yeah, I'm, I think they're both in the basement for a reason. Right. I think our institutions have, have really, you know, fallen. They haven't met the responsibility. I mean your school in particular, its job was to create and educate a natural aristocracy that would serve this experiment in self government work. I think they've swapped out and created a new one. That's not good. And the thing I think that's good about the salient and I've looked at some of the archives that you have is that you've actually shown that there's a virtue of sending some of the very best at Harvard still because when you guys show up there, you understand that you have to bring a better game and make arguments for what you've done. There's a piece that they did on women's issues that everybody here has to look at because I think it's the boldest sense. I mean, I started reading it with my friend Sam. I'm like, oh, my God, I want to spend the next hour reading this. You're bringing the best minds to the best arguments and the challenges. And if you don't recognize the value of what these best schools and these papers can do. Phil Buckley used to just use what ISI has always supported over the ages, which is like, this is the outlier academies. This is where you find all your little Harry Potters that will make the world a better place. But when Buckley would go to University of Chicago, he called out into a crowd and said, I want to talk to David Brooks. Right? That's what these papers are for. That's why these conversations happen. And, I mean, you're going to bump into people from Harvard. I bumped into you guys my whole life. I think you guys go in there smart. You don't come out tangibly better. But all of you guys are undeniable. And it's great when the people who go there study that mind and show how to engage it. And I think what real clear can do is to bring that type of genuinely liberal voice. If I had to say anything, if you want to make the American Academy better again, you have to make progressives liberal again. And I think you guys do that very well.
Dave Rubin
Well, it's interesting, I like the fact that you use the word liberal in the true sense, because I think we're largely speaking to conservatives here, but obviously the classical liberal tradition of individual rights and laissez faire economics and thought and reason and debate, things that Harvard and most of the Ivy League schools and hopefully all of our places of higher education really used to care about, that came from the classic liberal tradition. And yet the word liberal from an American perspective has been completely blown apart, I would say, to connect the media portion to the. To the college version. One of the things that made me sort of aware of this very early on is when I started the report back in 2013, and then I was kind of waking up to some of what was happening. I started going to colleges, including Harvard, and I went to colleges all over the country, and I was getting protested constantly, often violently protested, and having people throw things at me. Police would have to show up and they'd be pulling fire alarms. A lot of These things are online if you want to watch them. And I kept thinking, man, what am I saying that is remotely controversial here as I talk about why America has been an individual? Right. Yeah. Well, I was basically talking about freedom. And this was when trigger warnings and safe spaces, all of these things. It's sort of ironic. You look at what's happening at Columbia now. They've seemingly gotten rid of trigger warnings and safe spaces as they occupied the campus. But I. But I went there and I saw, boy, there are. And it wasn't just the students. That was the amazing thing to me. I would go and there would be professors leading the protest. And that was one of the things that really sort of blew me away, because it was like, boy, professors, you want to go and protest somebody? Of course. But when they were protesting by not allowing kids into the room again, by pulling fire alarms and things of that nature, everything was becoming so hysterical. So it was happening at the university. It clearly had been happening at these universities way before. And that all of the people who graduated these places, they went into jobs, into most of our institutions. They went into jobs in the media. And then we wondered why everything had featured. And then when you combine it with what I talked about a moment ago, with the algorithms and the way that we're catering all of these things to ourselves and all that, everything went hysterically to the left. And my friend Douglas Murray, who I'm sure many of you guys know, he's unbelievably brilliant, and he speaks in the Queen's English, which makes it even better, but often talks about how a society that suddenly is debating all of the things that it put to bed can be taken down very easily. So if, as a society, we're suddenly talking about whether boys or girls, well, then everything else is on the table. And you can see how that extrapolates now through a place like Columbia, where they're debating whether if you're going to allow Jewish students on campus is okay or not. So all of these things from the media perspective, the institutional layer that we thought, I think that the institutions would stand up and be better. And it's been very, I would say, shocking to the liberals, maybe more than the conservatives. The conservatives, I think, sort of thought, oh, we build things, and then we go on and we build other things. The liberals, like the sort of, ah, we're gonna build things and then talk about it, deconstruct it, do it again. But then they got blown apart in all of this, and that is why we're in such a massive Political realignment, which is again connected deeply to the media.
David de Rossier
Another I think kind of like interesting aversion that's happened, inversions happen, is that there's an establishment media and then there's an independent media and there's such a thing as conservative news, right? And liberal news. But people usually say the news, the Democrats, but I repeat myself, something like that, like the news Democrats, the ones to. At what point does for example your show become a part of the establishment media? What defines establishment? Is it corporate oversight or is it simply, you know, as long as YouTube is looking at your content and I know, like I know from Pen Shapiro show, they're little words will trigger, you know, the algorithm, for example, or in terms of like the types of headlines that real, real clearance publishing, you know, like you see absurd things from other media outlets, like how do you get traction in articles online, get people to see it without succumbing to that kind of like establishment media mindset. So I guess it's a two part question. What is the establishment media and how do you make sure that you're not it?
Dave Reuven
I mean one of the benefits that I think Real Clear has is that our method, I mean if you want to know like what constitutes viewpoint diversity right now, the First Amendment is the existence of viewpoint diversity. If you go to a page, our page particularly, you'll find viewpoint diversity, I think at its perfect expression, right? So you'll see two rival authorities saying the completely opposite things about the same reality every day, going right down and then updated twice a day. The same goes in where you want to actually find out, like everybody's doing push polling. Well, guess what? Turns out if you get a number of people that are each probably doing a little bit of a push, you bring them all together, you're cognizant of the fact that there's two sides to something and you divide by number, you get something that actually calls elections for the past 25 years. That's what RealClear does. Or if you allow people to at least just recognize that we live in, we live in a place where the American mind is divided, it's bipolar divided, right? But it's like every day I think everyone should just go down our list, pick what you like, but recognize that there's something that challenges you and you just read that, right? So I think that Real Clear is probably one of the few independent. And guess what? I don't see many competitors to us, which is good. But it's like I do think we have a place that plays a real salutary role in the news where it's the recognition that Dave really exists. I would say this prior to anybody, if you wanted to know what the media would have looked like if RealClear never went into business. There's this blacklist that was put out by gdi and pretty much Gordon Krovitz's news bar is close to it. Gdi, Global Disinformation Index. It was funded by our State Department, by the way, and it actually came up with a list of folks that advertisers should blacklist. And it turns out that Real Clear Politics is number seven on that list. And it's there. And our sin is that we actually bring the other people on that to the American people in a conversation that's curated to just show both sides. So independent media is under assault. They're trying to kill our business. They try to brown us out. If you want to know how they get rid of people's free speech, they take away advertising and then that limits your ability to do things. So it's censorship through advertising, starvation. It's improper and bad. But what I think Real Clear's gift to the American mind, the American conversation, is that we show an ascendant two party, healthy, maybe not always healthy American pursuit of our politics. But the showing of the both sides is hard. We live in a world where no one wants to see anything that actually challenges them. I think Real Clear value is we're like a free Bloomberg news terminal for everybody in the business. Radio, tv. You're thinking about what to do tomorrow based off of what you see on our site. And I think it has a positive good and what we've always been able to do with it. It's like we're the number one drivers of like, if, like one of the greatest magazines in this country, a couple of them, I would just bring out two that I don't think many people would know about if it wasn't for us. Is the Clannock Review of Books.
David de Rossier
Yeah.
Dave Reuven
Fantastic. In City Drama. Right. The, I mean these places are places of excellence. We put those on the, on that same level as the Atlantic. Right. You know, in the New Republic. And it's because they deserve to be there, you know, so my, you know, like I don't want a lot of people in the independent lane, happy to be there, want to like, you know, continue. But it's, you know, there's a great experiment of ours that's being worked out right now. And if, I think if we don't get together around the value of viewpoint diversity we die of it. And we shifted that over to Linda. I mean, we went from David, David is with me in connection with this thing we call the Salvastat Prize. And the first year we did it, it looked like the window on free speech was closing. This year it looked like it was half open. Right? And our goal is to keep it open. But the only way it's going to be open is if we make viewpoint diversity the common cause of everybody, be they conservative, libertarian, liberal.
Dave Rubin
And by the way, it is opening. I can give a little more of a white pill version of that, which is that as it pertains to the advertising portion of this, I mean, I've been through, just like Ben Shapiro and many other creators, every version of the demonetized and having your channel de boosted and shadow banned and all of these things that you guys are all well aware of. I would always say I'm less concerned about the things that I know that they're doing. I'm more concerned about the things that I don't know that they're doing. And then I was invited to Twitter, right, when Elon took over. And Jack Dorsey, who was the CEO of Twitter, pre Elon, he was the guy that was running the thing. He testified under oath when Ted Cruz asked him a question. We don't shadow ban on Twitter. I went to Twitter. The entire system was built to shadow ban every. I mean, they couldn't show me everything because there are privacy settings. But every page that I was allowed to see about how the system ran was, oh, you talked to this person, this person talked to this person, this person said this word, and here's the system that we're going to deboost this. And they couldn't even figure out what the full code around that was. As Elon said to me, it was a fractal rue gold machine. Like, that's how complex the thing was. Nobody, none of the engineers really understood what it was. But I would say that Elon has now repeatedly said that you are the media and that's us. And that is true. Think about it this way. If Twitter went down for 24 hours right now, I would basically have no idea what's going on in the world. Now try to imagine the other way. Okay? If abc, cbs, NBC, cnn, New York Times, Washington Post, throw in a couple others, if they all went down for 24 hours, we'd be free. Holy cow, you know what I mean? We'd be out there having a great.
David de Rossier
We'd know the real story.
Dave Rubin
You're right. Exactly. But really Think about that. So the entire mainstream layer, if it went away tomorrow, you all laughed at that joke for a reason. If it went away tomorrow, we'd all basically be okay. And if anything, we'd probably be better off because it has done such a negligent job of what its mission was supposed to be. If Twitter, the place where it's literally everything, if that went away, we would almost have no touch points that we could agree on or figure out how to get movies or anything else. And by the way, I hope I don't know this for sure. I know Elon a little bit. I hope he's working on all of the ways to make sure that that doesn't happen. Because Twitter X, in some sense, is the biggest weapon that we have against the machine, whatever you want to call.
Dave Reuven
That corporate layer of all, like Starlink.
Dave Rubin
For freedom it is. And he also owns Starlink, so that's pretty good. That might be one way that they can't take it out. I would say just very quickly, on the point of what happens if the alt media sort of takes over the mainstream media? Do we become the corporate media? Well, a. I would say largely that's happened. As I said before, Rogan is bigger than cnn. Fact, if I was pulling in the numbers that I said, you know, that MSNBC is getting, I would look for another job. So that has happened already. But that being said, everyone's got a boss at the end of the day. I mean, I went independent very early. It's why I started a tech company to help other people go independent. But as long as I'm on YouTube, yeah, I can still be demonetized. And you're demonetized enough. Well, that's a soft type of censorship. And you might say, okay, well, now I can't make a living. I guess I'm just not going to talk about that controversial thing anymore. So until we're all totally technologically free, whatever that really means, whether this is all done completely decentralized, I mean, there's all sorts of conversations around all that, and all of our commerce is done decentralized and everything else, and we're not there yet on some of these things, obviously, then, yes, if you have a job, in essence, you have a master, I think the best thing that you could do, as I've got my producer and my director here, is what we try to do on the show every day, which is I try to tell the truth the best that I can. And if I screw something up, we try to address it. And then over time, you Build some cred. And that's why I think it's so funny. You know, Jake Tapper who was brought in, he was at abc, chief White House correspondent at ABC before working at cnn. And he was pretty decent. He was thought of as sort of this moderate. You know, people didn't know what his politics are and that's the way he was supposed to be. Jake Tapper then became basically a Democrat operative at cnn. And as I'm sure some of you guys know, he has a book coming out next month laying out how the scandal around Biden's cognitive decline happened. And it's like, Jake, you were running cover for this thing for years. How dare you? Anyone else? Joe Biden should write the book or you should write it better.
Dave Reuven
Neat.
Dave Rubin
But. But that's how, but that's how they do it. They somehow have a way still. There is still something intrinsically built into the matrix that they can pull off the trick, lie about it and then still profit from it on the other side. So we're going through that change right now. And it's a generational thing too. A certain set of people, you know, largely the boomer generation, is just used to watching television, boxing. It was like that and now it's completely changed. And there's going to be some tension and some rough waters as we get to the other side. Most people know that staying hydrated is essential to nearly every bodily function. But 75% of Americans still don't consume enough fluid daily. As we age, natural body changes make staying hydrated even harder, especially without artificial additives or excess sugars. That's where Native Path comes in with extra help. Native Path's hydrate is not just another drink mix. It's a thoughtfully designed formula packed with BCAAs and all nine essential amino acids to help with muscle recovery and overall vitality. Plus, it's completely sugar free and 100% natural. With their native hydrate product, you can fuel your body with essential electrolytes at the cellular level for overall vital. Unlike other hydration drink mixes that are designed for marathon runners and contain upwards of 1000mg of sodium, native hydrate contains just 230mg of sodium for optimal daily hydration. Free of artificial flavor, sugars and dyes. It's only 5 calories per serving and every order comes with a 365 day money back guarantee. So you can try it risk free. Visit nativehydrate.com reuben to see what native hydrated can do for your health.
David de Rossier
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Dave Rubin
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Dave Rubin
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Dave Reuven
If I just want to make one point, if there's another problem, I think that kind of runs through kind of the censorship of our conversation. It's this recognition that there has to be a public conversation, if you follow the logic. I think one of the things that the left has always done to its best talent on the right, it was saying, you have all these people in X, go build a business, monetize them, and no one else will hear from you again. Right. So I. I think making you guys, like, in some respects, hot house flower successes is a way of actually keeping you guys in the box.
Dave Rubin
Yeah.
Dave Reuven
So, I mean, in the very least, if there's just one place where it's like the best of all the hot houses can come, just make exceptions for me and I don't care.
Dave Rubin
Well, actually, I hate this very quick on that point. I don't know if you guys saw it, but just this week, Media Matters, which is a far left, you know, nonprofit, they ran this giant expose on the alt media. And they were basically saying the alt media is all of these right wingers. And it was, you know, Rogan and Ben Shapiro and me and. And then it was like comedians like Theo Vaughn and just this like wild mix of people. And nobody buys this anymore. So everyone was like. Everyone that I saw on Twitter talking about it was like, well, this is just nonsense because you guys made us. The only reason the alt media is thought of as right leaning is because we were just the counter to the thing that you guys created. So that's the asymmetry right now. And we just have to keep. We have to just keep going and building and innovating. You got the bro fraternity.
David de Rossier
One final one from me, and then I'll open it up to you all. I think the campus conversation has a different level of urgency than the one in the public square. Part of our mission at the Salient, that reason why we feel so passionately about our work is because whether people like it or not, Harvard is graduating America's next leaders. There's a pipeline from Harvard to Washington D.C. just for example. Abby Phillip, a favorite on CNN, is a Harvard graduate who's come back to campus to talk about her expertise in lease Making.
Dave Reuven
That's not Jen. That is under discovery.
Dave Rubin
I'm sorry. Abby Phillips went to Harvard. Our new line on the show with her is that she is the dumbest person on television. That woman, she looks like she's staring into the nothing. The entire. I can't believe she went. It makes perfect sense nonetheless, you know, no offense. No offense.
David de Rossier
No, no, it's okay. I think nonetheless, we're trying to navigate within the establishment to the best of our ability at Harvard. And there's a certain given. For example, the salient I mentioned at the start of this had a moment where we didn't know if the administration was going to say, our professors were going to say, you're going to be banned from the dorms. But we understood that the only way out is to work with them, that we couldn't circumvent them within the context of Harvard. So given kind of that shaping, sharpening of America's youth and also the kind of unavoidable contact that you have with establishment, what hope do you have for the potential reformation or restoration of some of these institutions? I'm thinking in particular of big changes in the big tech atmosphere in terms of the censorship. You have Zuckerberg changing his tune dramatically. You have Jeff Bezos changing his tube dramatically. Elon Musk, like of course, for a long time. Do you think that the top down billionaire to the rest of us model will suffice or more. Do you think that there's some kind of more kind of realization, you know, broad grassroots realization that could potentially occur at places like the Times or Washington Post?
Dave Reuven
No, I'm, I'm bullish for, for like free voices on Ivy League campuses. Right? You know, so I think you guys have been suffering behind the ivory curtain for a long time. That October 7th they held up their iPhones and showed that Bill Gates was to the iPhone, Bill Ayers was to them. Right. This is the new kind of the American mind going forward is the Palestinian mind. And I think that's something you should be able to stand up and make that contrast with. Do it in the Harvard way, but make your like, make your peace with your tech billionaires who you're alumni. Right? You know, it seems like appman by. By October 7th, right? It seems like, you know, people are waking up saying show, show that best example. Find people who are trustees and alumni and stop investing in really the death of the experiment. Right? This, you know, Federalist one starts with. It's like we're founding something based on reflection and choice, right? This is an experiment in self government. These universities were fear school for Jefferson's, not for this, this madness. And to the degree that we don't take it back, we lose it, right? There's a great election. We just talk about the Overton window going shut down halfway over the pipeline. Pipeline from really Pre K to PhD is completely bill Edge, right? And it's like what, what happens is some of our best schools have like outliers like you guys. And I believe in the outlier because if, if the way to if, if you have an orchid, you know, fortune that's corrupted, the best thing you can do is plant a healthy tree. And when those roots touch, things change. But I'm a big fan of what you're doing. I want to publish you guys and I want to. Maybe I can sit back and share to play Bill Buckley someday. But it's like I think there's real greatness in the Ivies, there's real greatness in Harvard, there's real greatness in you. And you got to get behind it, we got to fund it. And it's like this is something I would kind of say once upon a time, Bill Ayers lost. They all went to the university, they licked their wounds and they educated our kids, right? And now we're looking at the idea that they own the future. All the best kids, all in the Commanding Heights all think not like you, right? And if we want to actually save our country, to bring it back, we have to have a loan replacement theory, right? And it has to be supportive. But it's like we have to build back better. The only way to overturn a bad idea is to put a better idea in its place. I think supporting what you're doing, but supporting the Ivies, keeping that kind of Robbie George kind of salient beachhead going. Harvey can't feel that Harvard Harvey, C minus, man. But it's really good that the students get it right, that even without all the teachers, they know they got to bring a better game. And it's probably a credit to your parents. Are they in the room? Whoever you guys are, good job.
Dave Rubin
I can answer that very clearly. I mean, the billionaires are not going to save us. No. Are there great millionaires? Yeah. Has Elon done something? I mean we just laid it out. Has he done something that has completely freed us from the corporate overlords? At least at the moment? Of course. And by the way, as I said, his line is you are the media. The line is in I'm the media. So he has done something to democratize this in an incredible way, there are others. Peter Thiel, who you mentioned, has been ahead of virtually everything ever since he's been in public life. Even before that, he was doing the Stanford review, you know, 30 something years ago at this point. David Sacks, who's now the crypto Aizar, has been ahead of most of those bad trends. I think he wrote that at the Stanford Review with Thiel. But they're not going to save us. We're going to save us. It's as simple as that. They cannot. First off, as a general rule, I don't believe in top down systems over time, right? Humans are meant to organize organically, bottom up, and that's the best way for people to do things that would protect the individual. And the individual, of course, is the smallest minority and the thing that we should care about most in a society of 350 million people. So we have to just figure out how to innovate better, how to find community again, how to fight for our culture again, how to stop debating the things that we should not debate anymore. Since I already quoted Douglas Murray once, I'll quote him again. Another line that he has is that one day the barbarians will be at the gate and we will be debating what gender pronouns to call them. And I think that that is right. That is what we've done, and it clearly has not worked. But the white pill version of that is that it is now brought together almost everybody. It's hard to see. It's really hard to see because of some of the things we've discussed here with social media and the way the mainstream media is collapsing. But most Americans, I would venture to say it's about 80% of Americans are actually on the same team. And it might even be more than that. I really believe that they have their own cultural beliefs, they have their own religious beliefs. They might have their own beliefs on taxation and abortion and all those things, but they think that this experiment is fundamentally good. They know why they came here, or their grandparents and great grandparents in my case came here. And they do believe that that is fundamentally good. So while we are slammed endlessly with the hysteria at Columbia and now watching people literally blow up Teslas on the street because the guy saved astronauts the other day, it's all very confusing why they're doing this. That is a very specific sliver of people that we have to figure out how to address them properly and understand that, but then realize that the rest of us really do want to be part of this broad American experiment and strengthen either the institutions that exist to whatever extent they can be saved and strengthened and really just go out and build new stuff, sort of like they're doing at University of Austin. And there are some other places.
David de Rossier
Excellent. All right. I'd love to open up to questions if you just raise your hand and I'll pick on. I saw him first have you ever.
Dave Rubin
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Dave Reuven
Chalkdefense.Com Rubin thank you so much.
David de Rossier
So you know, one of the issues I'm having is institutional knowledge. So I'm a Wharton brass, my middle son to Morton Brad and my a bunch of sons of Cornell grads and frankly but when Penn brought the pro Palestinian Writers Forum to The university and DP, you know, went along, I used to write through DP back in the 1980s on the youngest boomer or whatever. But it was frightening to me to see the institutional knowledge just basically being passed down in a very narrow microcosm of this is what our institution stands for. My middle son tried to start a finance and started the Fintech club at Wharton and they said we can't fund you because you're non minority. And yet he all his members, it was open to the entire university. So there was a bias against anyone wanting to do greater good land. The writers forum came and there was a DP article written by Mark Rowan who criticized the what the university was doing. DP refused to publish that. It turned out that he then had to go to CNN and he had to go to CNBC and he had to blast out what was happening at the university. And it's frankly frightening that the college newspapers that are supposed to be for free speech and supposed to Allow for your freedom of thought. Actually censored a powerful alumni. And it took that alumni getting so frustrated that he then went to all the other powerful alumni to overturn the president of the university. So how do you change that?
Dave Reuven
Yeah, I mean, I think you just captured something I would coin as adjacency, corporatism. Like, you have people, like, who just exist to come out and say, there's a cause. We all support this cause. We don't support that cause. Right. And you have to be very powerful. How many people can get, you know, call Mark Hoffman, you know, cnbc, say, mark, they shut me down. No one shuts me down. Right. That's how the IVs controlled. And that's how they transformed. They took billionaire students and they made them into sitting in all the chairs of the commanding heights to the degree where they own the Alphabet soup companies that in the 60s, when Nixon was looking at and pushing, the silent majority was pushing it back. They own all of those, too. And it's because your school system has become a feeder school of the natural aristocracy of America. Right. And if there's something that I could leave you with, I was at a conversation, and this guy, Richard Epstein, I don't know if you've ever heard him, guy speaks for a living. And he just. He was talking, he said he's telling a story about how he had a conversation with Jamie Dimon. And Jamie Dimon was like, I just hire all these bright best and brightest from everywhere. They come from Dartmouth, they come from Penn, they come from Wharton. And it's like none of them want to actually lend money to anybody who's building a pipe for natural gas. They hate cigarettes and they want to push esg. Right. And then this guy, Richard Epstein says, maybe you should hire people from Texas A and M. Right. I do think there has to be a mental shift where people who are outside, who are graduates and alumni that are in the markets, better stop actually entitling stupid. They might have to go to Texas A and M before they can get someone from Water again.
Dave Rubin
I would just add to that quickly. We just need to think about these things in a new way. We have a running joke on my show. My last three hires are all college dropouts. My executive producer was my intern, and he's a college dropout.
Dave Reuven
Good for you.
Dave Rubin
Yeah.
Dave Reuven
I have a PhD.
Dave Rubin
And that's not to say that people can go into some of these schools and come out better people and more educated. Particular, you know, even the STEM cells, STEM subjects people thought would be sort of Inoculated, but they've now been hit with all of this. It's not to say that none of it is good. Right? Of course. And there's technical knowledge that maybe you can only learn in college, but you can also get an apprenticeship. There's also a zillion other ways to do things. We have twin 2 year olds. And the fact that now me as a father have to think about what, what do I want to do with my kids for preschool because they might be taught they're both boys, that they're girls. Like the layers of this have just become so deeply infected that I would say that the positive part is that people are thinking about it differently. Where for generations it was just like the factory. Like, you go to public school, you'll basically get out, you'll go to college, you'll basically get out, you'll work in the corporate environment, you'll basically get out, you'll have a house in the suburbs and everything else. And now the world is just going to look very, very different. And again, that really is the opportunity for the people that are, you know, down to the rest. So I think everyone will agree that.
Dave Reuven
The written media, New York Times, Washington.
Dave Rubin
Post, New York Post kind of attract different audiences. And I don't know what the technical regulations are regarding the reporting. Obviously cable media has their own bios, but when, if things change for mainstream, the abc, NBC, I mean they're regulated by the fcc, their stations are regulated. When they start to come off the rails, if you would, what do you.
Dave Reuven
Think kind of propagated that and do.
Dave Rubin
You think Trump's threat to pull licenses, you know, from CBS or NBC for.
Dave Reuven
Band Report and they shake them into.
Dave Rubin
Getting back to sector. I'll give you the short answer and then you could probably give a more in depth history answer. The short answer is that Trump's first time around completely blew everything apart. Whatever degree or sort of patina of decency or moderation that they had was completely ripped off of that. And then because we could uncover, I mean, I always go back to the very fine people hoax from Charlottesville that I mentioned before because it was incredible to watch that mainstream Barack Obama the day before this election. So in November of 24, was giving a speech for Kamala and said it again. So if you're Barack Obama, what do you do? Either you don't know and I think a lot of things about Barack Obama, but I don't think he's dumb. So Barack Obama knew the truth, but he thought, boy, these people are so freaking stupid. Still the amount of voters out there, and it's. I need about 50 million voters or something like that. These people are still so dumb now. They are so uneducated and ridiculous. And I know Kamala thinks that black people don't know how to use computers or something, but like, she really. He really thought that to the point that he could throw that lie out there. And now it didn't work anymore. So. So that really is. That is the hope now that enough people have woke up and that eventually the liars will just. It just won't get traction anymore. That's the other reason that Community Notes on Twitter has been so great, because we're finally fact checking people in real time. And that's probably just. We're probably at like letter A of the full Alphabet of the way that they will evolve Community Notes to make it more appropriate. But maybe on the history part of.
Dave Reuven
That, I mean, I think the historical footnote is in 2016, two things happened that shook the world. It was election, Donald Trump and Brexit. And that was the day that the media broke. That was the day that I think corporate media stood up and said, no more. And they introduced Orwellian speak of mis dis and malinformation. And we have been living in that world since then. And I think we need to shake it off.
David de Rossier
And we're still there.
Dave Reuven
Oh, we're going to be there for a long time in the university, probably for another 60 years. So I have a question that I keep wondering and I never really get an answer to.
Dave Rubin
Do you know anyone on the left.
Dave Reuven
Who wakes up and actually says out loud, maybe this isn't what I signed up to do when I become a journalist. Like, why isn't there one person ever, really?
Dave Rubin
Because there's so many journalists.
Dave Reuven
There's so many journalists on the left.
Dave Rubin
Journalism is this, like, wonderfully respected thing.
Dave Reuven
Especially if you're like, over the age of 35 and remember when journalists were great.
Dave Rubin
Yeah.
Dave Reuven
Where are these people? Like, how is there.
Dave Rubin
No.
Dave Reuven
Do you know anyone?
Dave Rubin
Well, it tells you the power of. You think really what you're talking about. Because every time I say journal, this time I show I have to go like this. They're journalists. They're air quote journalists. There are very, very few. You mentioned the New York Post. The New York Post does a pretty good job of journalists. David can talk about some of the other institutions that do it, but most of these people, most of these people are activists. The New York Times about five years ago ran a cover story that Jordan Peterson, Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, me and Ben Shapiro were the leaders of the alt right. I mean, really try to think how insane.
Dave Reuven
What an awesome.
Dave Rubin
It's always nice to be mentioned in the same sense as Thomas Sowell, but like, that's the level of insanity that nobody there seems to be able to stop. I would say the clearest thing I can say about this is that Jordan, who I think is the best public intellectual that we have in the world, and he's, in some sense, he's more of a prophet, I would say, than a public intellectual. For years, he's going to D.C. and he was talking to congressional Democrats and senators and media people about what the question he would always ask them is, when does the left go too far? And he could never get anyone to answer. So nobody could answer that question. Right? There's many ways. Okay, you've gone too far. When you block students from entering campus, you've gone too far. Let us tell boys that they're girls. We could do a laundry list of things, right? But he could never get anyone to say it. And I think that, that because of their subjective view of the world, I think there's probably religious and philosophical and existential reasons connected to all of that that has led to journalists thinking that I'm not supposed to report on the world of how it is I'm supposed to report. I'm supposed to confuse people so that the world will become the way I want it to be. And I don't, I, I don't think it's more complex than that, actually. And there's very, very you. And by the way, if you become one of the ones who does wake up. And I was on the left, so I know a little bit about waking up. You are then enemy number one. They will hate you way more than they're going to hate Ben Shapiro or Dennis Prager or Larry Elder or some standard Republican or conservative. But now you're the traitor and they've really got to take you out. So I think there's societal pressures, there's social pressures. They throw good open bar parties.
Dave Reuven
There's so many. You're found in your peace, though.
Dave Rubin
You went, yeah, I did it. It's better.
Dave Reuven
I would just add to that. It's, you know, getting back. If you really want to make, you know, progressives America great again, you have to make progressives liberal again. Like Bill Keller at the New York Times. I think I'm getting it right all of a sudden, you know, right after Trump came. It's when Trump broke the media, when they just said one day, you know what, we've always tried to play this Max Weber fact value distinction game like we can't do it anymore. We're actually coming out and being advocates in advocacy journalism. I think you have to step back from that. And it's like, it's certainly time to step back from that. If we don't step back from that, it's just stupid tribalism and it's not going to help. It's not going to heal our gun.
David de Rossier
I see the general Trump is currently.
Dave Rubin
Doing about 120% of what anyone reasonably.
Dave Reuven
Expect him to do to fight wokeness. But it's all through executive orders, which.
Dave Rubin
Can be undone by a future Democratic president.
Dave Reuven
There's really only two ways to make.
Dave Rubin
This reasonably permanent legislation, or better yet, Supreme Court decisions.
Dave Reuven
To what extent do you think Trump.
Dave Rubin
Is going to be successful in making.
Dave Reuven
These reforms more permanent?
Dave Rubin
Well, I would say there's one other way, which is through a cultural revolution. Most revolutions are bloody and hopefully this one doesn't have to be bloody. So that. I don't like that in some sense, in like a purely philosophical sense. I don't like doing everything by executive action. I didn't like Obama did it. I don't like when Republicans do it. So I agree with the notion that you're putting out there, but I would say he's done so much so fast, as you just said, 120%. He's just plowing through everything and somehow he still, I mean, it's really incredible what this guy is doing, right? He's doing so much at once. The world is so fundamentally different. You know, we're getting closer to a settlement with Russia, Ukraine. It does seem like the Middle east thing will have some combination, I would guess within six months to a year. Clearly, everything that's happening with Doge, we can do the list of things, all of the woke stuff, right? And if you can have four years of doing a lot, even if it's partly not exactly the way we want it done. And I know this is. There's a slippery slope argument here because it could be reversed on the other side, if the culture can change enough that it's like, boy, we really did get that close to the end. And the culture fully shifts and our movies shift and our TV shows shift and what's cool shifts and we can make When's the last time you heard.
Dave Reuven
A new song that was good?
Dave Rubin
It's been a long time, right? Like, if we could really fix the culture, then the next president that comes in, even if it's a Democrat will have to deal with that baggage. So I know that's not perfect sort of political answer, but as Breitbart said, politics is downstream of the culture.
Dave Reuven
And I'd like to say it's like Trump gets on, you know, gets, like, gets on the green in one shot with an executive order and he has to, he has to sink the ball if he wants to keep it. But I do think it's kind of part of a shock and awe kind of approach towards politics. The other side sees it as shock and awful. Right. But it's. He does set the standard. He does that 80, 20 divide. And I think, you know, he, if he doesn't push it legislatively, he doesn't make it real. It's not real. It can be reversed. But I do think that it's like everybody thinks that this is only the, the only tool in his box. And I think, I think he knows how to pl.
David de Rossier
All right, one more question from the Sure.
Dave Rubin
I want to go back to Dave said earlier, which they mentioned that the love has a impact of reality media. And then the Adventist podcast is analogy. And that's analogy about you as your rodent drug. You're being able to be more human level. And that really spurred, you know, just making certain movement. And so then he went on to talk about AI21. And so I'm finding that in different industries, nothing to do with this, people are already in the IP team and there's something that's already captured. Think about it.
Dave Reuven
And so my question is, how are you making that human connection with that.
Dave Rubin
Being so special and so famous? How does that relay so that you don't succumb to the cycle of the bump brain model? One point. What if you found out right now I was the AI version of me just looking. It's a great question. Look, As I said, 15 years from now, the world is going to look so fundamentally different. So many of the jobs that we all have, and I think that includes talk show hosts, are going to be gone. It's not just, you know, the thing that people are talking about now is, okay, we can bring in a certain set. The Democrats keep saying we need all these immigrants because they're going to pick our fruit. Which is a horrific argument because it's basically saying we're going to have this indentured servitude layer forever, but they're being replaced by robots now. It is happening now. And then you'll have brought all these people into the country and then these People won't have jobs and will need to be on the, you know, on the government dole and paid for by everybody else. Everything is going to change. So the best thing that you can do, I think really the only way I can answer that question is you can be as authentic as you can possibly be for as long as you can possibly do it. But that's not just for what I do for a living. That's literally for whatever you do for a living or anyone in this room, whether you're a researcher or shoe salesman or a ditch digger or whatever it might be. Do it to the best of your ability in the most authentic way possible. And then I think that spurs on good things. I would also. Just one other thing. I mean, I'm a big sci fi guy. Much of my politics is based on the Matrix and that the machines are going to turn on in Skynet and Scatter Darkly and Pre Corn I was moving Minority Report and all these things. Seinfeld, I don't think it was sci fi, but a lot of it did come from that too. So I'm very aware of this place that we're in. You know, it feels like in every sci fi movie, if you watch A.I. the movie A.I. or any book by Isaac Asimov, there's always this weird moment right before everything bad happens where everybody's like, you know, this bad thing's going to happen. The robots are going to turn on and the machines are going to take over and everyone just does it anyway. And it's seems like we're sort of in that moment right now. Everyone's like, what the hell is happening here? We're all turning to AI instead of Googling things and Grok and all these things. And it's like, I don't know, is Grok giving me exactly what the truth is? Like we're outsourcing a lot of the sanity and the reality. So we're in that moment right now and it's going to be different for all of us. That really is the answer. You will have to have a relationship with the universe in your pocket and you're going to have to figure out how to navigate that and everyone's going to do it differently.
Dave Reuven
I have a question.
David de Rossier
Oh, I was gonna say, you don't have to raise your hand.
Dave Reuven
What do you need from us?
David de Rossier
Oh, thanks for the tee up. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. You know, I think first, if I could just explain a little bit more about what the Salient does at Harvard, that'll get us going in the Right direction. So the Salient was founded in 1981. It's, it began as a reignite kind of passion project. I was born in 94, but I sensed that at that time that perhaps that was the last time at Harvard where socially, culturally, on campus, you could kind of flaunt your Republican ness and you wouldn't be canceled for it. Right. And printed consistently up until actually some ambiguous time in the Obama era. And perhaps it was right before 2016. We have to dig through alumni archives to actually figure out precisely when the Salient went out of print. But it was very unfortunate that it did because at that point campus was a total progressive vacuum. Right. There was no conservative voice at Harvard. And we had, you know, for example, Professor Harvey Mansfield was teaching a great political science class. But outside of the classroom, most of what we perceive is like the real campus conversation is happening in the dining halls, it's happening in the dorms, it's not necessarily strictly in the classroom. So we are very, very grateful that in 2021 the salient came back into print. We print six issues per semester. They're lying all around the gallery today, so please grab a copy before you go. Each issue's got like 10 to 15 articles themed around a particular subject. And we ask our writers to articulate a conservative perspective or viewpoint fully. Flesh out pen to paper, which I know that sounds weird from a college perspective like that. You know, does everyone just type everything up today and use AI to, to get their brainstorm ideas out? But the Salient team does it the old fashioned way. We want to put our ideas down and present them in print in front of our peers. And hence the distribution stuff that I mentioned at the start of the evening. So right now I think the answer for Harvard is there's a lot of top down reform happening. So post October 7, you know, the public certainly saw the problems, major donors saw the problems at Harvard and most other Ivy League schools. The Trump administration certainly is putting on the pressure in terms of Federal Funding, Title 6, et cetera.
Dave Reuven
How much does it cost to run one of these?
David de Rossier
Ultimately the sailing actually in the red booklets, we have our budget information and everything disclosed.
Dave Reuven
You can do a lot with a little.
David de Rossier
We are looking to build a conservative institution at Harvard. It's not just about being a think tank. Right. Like it's not just about writing and transcribing, which we do with a ton of pride, but it's also about creating that grassroots campus culture where the students feel that debate is the norm again, where they can go to their front with, you know, a super conservative idea and not be socially outcast for uttering the wrong thing in front of. In a social setting. Right. So that is our work on campus. It happens slowly, as do most grassroots thing. But I would say from the student perspective, this is one of the best ways to truly reform schools like Harvard. And for what it's worth, whether you're an alumni or not, it. Harvard is the city on the hill in terms of the broader Ivy League. I do sense that the media loves to sink its teeth into Harvard. When we have good news, we also want to spread it to folks so that they know that when a positive decision is made at Harvard that other schools can follow in that week. And we certainly have said that so far outside of publishing, we have events going on constantly. We actually have a headquarters that costs us a pretty penny. It's about 80k of rent a year in Harvard Square. But we've started renting it out to friendly student groups. So we have a bipartisan debate society who rents out from us. We have a Catholic reading group and a Protestant reading group and a Jewish reading group, actually. And it's all this kind of like, extracurricular campus activity that you think would happen by default, but doesn't happen unless they feel this, like, comfort in a friendly space, which is happening right now at the Salient. So I In. In these packets that are lying around, there's some right by the door. I'd love it if you grab one.
Dave Reuven
We.
David de Rossier
We need your support more than anything.
Dave Reuven
And this is their spring break.
David de Rossier
And make sure before you leave that you say hello to me and a bunch of the Salient team members are around. If they look under 21, they probably. They probably. We are. And make sure you talk to our team members, because as far as Harvard students go, you know, I'm. I'm slightly older as a student. I'm 30. I took a long leave and then returned. You know, these are the only students at Harvard that I wanted to hang out with and I wanted to spend time with, because I just immediately was hit over the head with how brilliant these conservative Harvard students are. Any last words?
Dave Reuven
Thank you. Thank you, thank you.
Podcast Summary: The Rubin Report – "The End of Legacy Media & What Replaces It"
Host: Dave Rubin
Guests: Dave Reuven (Reuven Report), David de Rossier (RealClear Politics)
Release Date: March 30, 2025
In this episode of The Rubin Report, host Dave Rubin engages in a profound discussion with Dave Reuven from the Reuven Report and David de Rossier from RealClear Politics. The primary focus centers on the transformation and decline of legacy media, the rise of alternative media platforms, and the broader implications for free speech and societal discourse.
Key Discussion Points:
Partisanship and Misinformation: The guests highlight how traditional mainstream media has become increasingly partisan and prone to misinformation. Dave Reuven emphasizes that outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News have fostered hyper-partisan environments, leading to a loss of credibility.
Media Collapse: Dave Rubin compares mainstream media to "a dinosaur in the La Brea Tar Pits," suggesting that traditional outlets are sinking while alternative platforms surge ahead.
Notable Quote:
Dave Rubin (05:33): "And they lied and lied and lied and lied. And they could get away for it, get away with it for a long time."
Key Discussion Points:
Podcasts and Independent Media: The conversation delves into how podcasts and platforms like YouTube, Rumble, and Locals have democratized content creation, allowing voices outside the traditional media hierarchy to flourish.
Influential Figures: Figures like Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro are cited as exemplars of how alternative media can rival the reach and influence of legacy news networks.
Notable Quote:
Dave Reuven (05:33): "And what that led to was the rise of, I suppose, people like me and people like Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro..."
Key Discussion Points:
Algorithmic Curation: The guests discuss how social media algorithms tailor content to individual preferences, creating echo chambers and reinforcing existing beliefs.
Impact on Reality Perception: Dave Reuven mentions Scott Adams’ analogy of everyone "watching the same movie and having completely different reactions," underscoring the subjective interpretation of shared information.
Notable Quote:
Dave Rubin (01:38): "As time goes on and as the media splits and we all go off in our own different directions, it's something we're really going to have to grapple with..." (01:38)
Key Discussion Points:
Importance of Diverse Perspectives: RealClear Politics emphasizes the necessity of viewpoint diversity to maintain a healthy public discourse. They advocate for presenting opposing viewpoints to foster understanding and reduce polarization.
Censorship Concerns: The discussion touches on how advertising boycotts and platform censorship serve as modern forms of suppressing dissenting voices.
Notable Quote:
Dave Reuven (24:50): "We live in a world where no one wants to see anything that actually challenges them. I think Real Clear value is we're like a free Bloomberg news terminal for everybody in the business."
Key Discussion Points:
Academic Influence on Media: David de Rossier highlights the symbiotic relationship between elite educational institutions like Harvard and the media, suggesting that biases within academia permeate journalistic practices.
The Salient at Harvard: The Salient, a conservative publication at Harvard, is discussed as a counterbalance to the prevailing progressive narratives on campus, aiming to reinvigorate free speech and debate.
Notable Quote:
Dave Reuven (35:07): "But it's been very unfortunate that it did because at that point campus was a total progressive vacuum. Right."
Key Discussion Points:
Elon Musk’s Role: Elon Musk is portrayed as a pivotal figure in democratizing media through platforms like Twitter (now X) and Starlink, providing alternatives to traditional media control.
Artificial Intelligence in Media: The potential for AI to produce news content is explored, raising questions about authenticity and the future of journalism.
Notable Quote:
Dave Rubin (27:38): "Elon has now repeatedly said that you are the media and that's us. And that is true."
Key Discussion Points:
Cultural Shifts: The guests argue that America is undergoing a significant cultural realignment, with traditional values being challenged by progressive ideologies, especially within institutions like universities.
Political Strategies: Discussion on how figures like Donald Trump have leveraged media and cultural tensions to reshape political landscapes through executive actions and grassroots movements.
Notable Quote:
Dave Reuven (43:29): "So the Salient was founded in 1981...it was very unfortunate that it did because at that point campus was a total progressive vacuum."
Key Discussion Points:
Potential Outcomes: The conversation speculates on future scenarios where alternative media could replace legacy outlets, potentially leading to a more fragmented but diverse media landscape.
Grassroots Movements: Emphasis on the importance of grassroots efforts and community-building to counterbalance entrenched media and academic biases.
Notable Quote:
Dave Rubin (43:38): "But that's how they do it. They somehow have a way still. There is still something intrinsically built into the matrix that they can pull off the trick, lie about it and then still profit from it on the other side."
The episode concludes on a cautiously optimistic note, suggesting that while legacy media faces undeniable decline, the rise of alternative platforms and grassroots movements holds promise for a more open and diverse public discourse. The guests call for continued vigilance in promoting free speech, viewpoint diversity, and authentic journalism to navigate the evolving media landscape.
Final Notable Quote:
Dave Rubin (62:08): "As I said, 15 years from now, the world is going to look so fundamentally different. So many of the jobs that we all have... are going to be gone."
Summary
In "The End of Legacy Media & What Replaces It," Dave Rubin and his guests dissect the transformative shifts in the media landscape, attributing the decline of traditional media to increasing partisanship and the rise of misinformation. They advocate for the burgeoning alternative media platforms as essential for maintaining free speech and diverse viewpoints. The conversation intricately links media evolution with cultural and educational institutions, emphasizing the need for grassroots movements to foster a more balanced and authentic public discourse. The episode serves as both a critique of existing media structures and a call to action for embracing new forms of media to uphold democratic values.