Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson live in Phoenix (12 Rules tour)

It's on me. There we go. All right, we're live. We're live! Holy cow! Hello YouTube! We are live in Phoenix. We are at Comerica Theater. I've got this Jordan Peterson guy. I'm Simon. I'm somehow hosting on his channel, but that doesn't seem right. We're about to do, what are we, maybe 13, 14, 15? They're all starting to blend. Yeah, good wardrobe department. I feel very sharp.

This theater in Phoenix is one of the most interesting ones yet. It's very big, yeah. Stories high inside. Yeah, so about 4,000 people waiting in there. It's about 105 in Phoenix today. Yeah, they were actually only here to purchase the orchid. Very much! I literally went to the gym twice today to sweat indoors because it was so hot outdoors. But we've been bouncing around; we just did three stops in Texas. And what I say to you every night, I say it before we started, then at the end, it's like: man, everything that they say about this man, about this tour, about everything going on here, it's completely the reverse.

Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Yeah, well I spend lectures talking to people; it's usually about a hundred and fifty people that I get to say hello to. Yeah, and everybody has 15 seconds or so to tell me a story, but they don't. They're saying audio is really low. Audio is low? All right, we're gonna talk louder. Okay, all right, we're gonna talk louder. How's that? Let's see if we can pick it up.

Yeah, so yeah, oh letter G, Peter, come on man. So, I talked to about 150 people afterwards, and they all have a story to tell me. But most of the stories are variants on a theme, which is that they're happy to listen to the lectures because it's helping them clarify their thinking or providing them with words that they haven't had before to describe things they know that to be true. Or they tell me that there are a couple or that there's a father and son there or father's daughter or mother and daughter, and they're getting along better, or it's a couple that's just decided to get engaged and their relationship is better, or a father who's doing better with his kids.

None of it is political; very little of it is political. Yeah, it's maybe 10% political. And I'll talk to the camera for a second for this, because every day when they tell you that Jordan's, you know, it's angry white men, right? That's it. Okay, first off, he's, I would guess it's about 60-40 usually male to female. There are gay people, there are black people, white people, Asian people. There were Muslims last night and Jews. I mean the whole thing, all of that diversity, that actually doesn't matter, it's all there. And they just, they just consistently lie about it.

Well, I think that it seems to me that the, let's say, the mainstream media types that have been peering me in various ways don't have a lexicon for dealing with a phenomena that's primarily psychological. They have to make this fundamentally political. Yeah, the political aspects of it, you know, insofar as I'm not the family leftist, for example. And by the way, you've been slamming the radical right too. I mean your whole thing, I mean this is the irony of the situation is you talk about the identity politics to the right and the danger of that as much almost on stage.

I don't like collectivists. Yeah, I think it's a bad route, and I think it takes us down the tribal path. And I think that the end destiny of a tribal path is bloodshed. And I don't care whether it's the left or the right; I'm more perturbed about the left wing because of their dominance in the universities in particular. And that's what, you know, that's where a lot of this came from. But it's the collectivist issue that's at hand, and almost everything that we've been talking about, what I'm talking about with the audiences, about the Western tradition of individual responsibility.

Essentially, also not individual rights although they're part of the discussion. Yeah, that's funny to be. But I would also say, being in the collectivist lexical, there's no such thing as free speech, and there's really no such thing as individual responsibility. And so, insofar as I'm able to make a case for that, that makes me an enemy. But even more importantly, it takes the dialogue outside of their way they frame the world. They don't know what to do about it.

Yeah, I don't know how to handle it, so they invent an enemy essentially, right? They don't really do the work intellectually to counter the arguments. So, they just do the same old thing. We were saying right before we started how I didn't, a year and a half ago, we didn't even know each other. No. The first time we ever did anything together was, I think, it was November 2nd of 2016, which was a day or two before the American election. It feels like a lifetime ago.

We did, I just moved into my house, I didn't have my studio yet. And we did a little Google hangout thing, and the audio was terrible, the video was bad, and you were telling me about the Pinocchio's memory, which now most dear audience knows about. And you were getting teary-eyed on it, and it ended, and I thought, and truly I've been excited to you. I was like, I don't know exactly what to make of this guy. And then subsequently you came on my show many times, and we've done a couple hours together. And we did sit down with Shapiro, and it's like a three-month or two-month.

This thing just levels up, levels up, and it feels more real. It feels more concrete, and we're all kind of growing together. Yeah, but I got to tell you, man, we crossed 600,000 YouTube subscribers, I think on the same day you got like 1.2 right now. I'm almost at 800. I'm starting—I like competition! I do like competition; we do like that. Yeah, but it's just so cool watching this whole thing grow.

Well, luckily, as hundreds of millions of people come online, we're gonna run out of audience. Yeah, because there's another two billion people to join the electronic web with enough bandwidth to start streaming videos. So, it goes to me that this whole online video, audio, and podcasts world is just getting its legs underneath it. Yeah, God knows where it's gonna go. All right, well since we're behind the scenes in the green room, let's just do a couple behind-the-scenes things right here.

First off, just how you feelin' while doing this whole thing? My health is improving very much. Yeah, so yeah, so that's really, that's really working out well. Yeah, I'm having a very nice time with the audiences. They're unbelievably—Isn't it incredible? I mean meeting these people, like just and literally everything. We haven't had one protester. No, just everybody.

Yes, they're planning something in Portland. Yeah, well we'll see about Portland. Really, you know, every night after the show you meet a certain amount of people afterwards, and I usually go out into the crowd. Yeah, there's hundreds, sometimes thousands of people waiting. It's like, yeah, good thing you're not a germaphobe. Yeah.

Yeah, well the other thing too is if I protested in Richmond or Portland to any degree, I'm gonna videotape the lecture elite and put it online, and then people can see what's being protested. Yeah, I think so, I think that's the plan when we do these. They've pretty much been different every single night. I mean we've done about 15 shows, and I mix it up a little bit every night.

You know, there's a couple jokes in there that are the mainstays, some lobster stuff and the rest, but yeah, well you can't dispatch the lobsters; they have to be in there. But, you pretty much have an hour and a half that you do, and then especially when we do the Q&A after, which is totally off-the-cuff, you're kind of just going in and out. Sometimes you do three rules, sometimes you do a rule, sometimes, you know, rules, and yeah, it's kind of amazing.

Yeah, well I'm trying to develop a very large corpus of stories around each of the chapters, and then I can mix and match them. And I'm also trying to push the ideas that I've been developing in the book farther ahead with each talk, yeah. And so I spent a lot of time talking about the relationship between hierarchies and goals and difference in status; that's been a main theme.

And the relationship between truth and quality of existence; that's another one that there's a very powerful positive relationship there, necessary. And so, in all of those themes, you know, there's no end to the amount you can develop them, and each venue gives me an opportunity to push it a little bit farther and clarify what I'm thinking and get the story a little bit tighter and see how B or D and see how the individuals in the audience are reacting.

Yeah, and so I like the fact that you open with some humorous intro and that the Q&A has an element of lightness and comedy in it because one of the things I learned a long time ago was that even if you're dealing with something that's extremely serious, if you can't do it with the comedic touch, then you haven't got the balance right. Even if it's deadly serious stuff. Yeah, and they look, they love it when you make them laugh—sometimes accidentally even—like, they really love seeing that.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah. All right, well you got a show to get. I do, I guess I got a show to do. But you really got a show. You all right guys, that's Jordan Peterson. I'm Dave Berman. Would you tell these good people to subscribe to my channel? Subscribe to Dave's damn channel! The subscribers far behind! [Laughter] Don't make me the bottom lobster, guys! I get it, he's the top lobster, but can we do it a second, grab a lobster or something?

All right, all right. It's gonna be fun tonight, and we look forward to seeing you guys. We're doing this through July, and then you're continuing into August. Yeah, maybe September too! Yeah, you're gonna jump back in in September? All right, awesome. Yeah, great you know, thanks, Johnny.