Independent journalist Rav Arora joins us to challenge mainstream views on white privilege, discuss his journey from India to Canada, and address topics ranging from historical injustices, the Canadian media's decline to the COVID vaccine debate and the impact of psychedelics on mental health with host Aaron Pete.
Rav Arora is an essayist and independent journalist writing on Substack. Passionate about challenging mainstream views, he writes extensively on civil liberties, free speech, pharmaceutical drugs, and psychedelic therapy. His thought-provoking pieces can be found on "The Illusion of Consensus" Substack, as mentioned on The Joe Rogan Experience. Rav's insights have been showcased on renowned podcasts, including conversations with luminaries like Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand and Ben Shapiro.
Subscribe to Rav Arora: https://www.illusionconsensus.com/
Independent journalist Rav Arora joins us to challenge mainstream views on white privilege, discuss his journey from India to Canada, and address topics ranging from historical injustices, the Canadian media's decline to the COVID vaccine debate and the impact of psychedelics on mental health with host Aaron Pete.
Rav Arora is an essayist and independent journalist writing on Substack. Passionate about challenging mainstream views, he writes extensively on civil liberties, free speech, pharmaceutical drugs, and psychedelic therapy. His thought-provoking pieces can be found on "The Illusion of Consensus" Substack, as mentioned on The Joe Rogan Experience. Rav's insights have been showcased on renowned podcasts, including conversations with luminaries like Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand and Ben Shapiro.
Subscribe to Rav Arora: https://www.illusionconsensus.com/
Welcome back to another episode of the Bigger than Me podcast. Here is your host, aaron.
Aaron Pete:P. Freedom of expression is a topic we cover a lot in this podcast. I think it's important that we do so. We're seeing government censorship and increasing self-censorship by people afraid to share their political views on a variety of issues. My guest did that courageously, shared his perspectives and ended up being cancelled by friends and community members. Despite this, he was willing to persevere and continue to share his perspective on a variety of issues and remain independent, thoughtful and courageous throughout his entire journalistic career. My guest today is Rav Arora. We've been looking at doing this for a while. I'm so thrilled to have you on. Would you mind introducing yourself for people who might not be acquainted with your work?
Rav Arora:Sure Rav Arora, independent journalist, started writing in 2020, especially after the George Floyd protests and riots. I published this big piece on the fallacies of white privilege and the toxicity of identity politics and that piece just kind of took off and just one thing led to another. And surprise, three years later I'm a journalist now, which I know expectation or anticipation that I'd be here, but it's an interesting place where I can kind of follow my curiosity.
Aaron Pete:We'll definitely get there. But I think when we're talking about politics and political issues, it's important to humanize the person. It's so easy to get caught on a political point and forget your human being, your family members you have loved ones your person first. So can you start with your background, your family where you grew up and your connections to Canada, and being Sure.
Rav Arora:Yeah, I also want to say something quickly Was I think you asked me to do the podcast? I think was it last year or was it the year before. I think yeah, it was at least last year, and last year I was just in a very tough place personally, and it took many, many sessions of deep diving and therapy and looking at child. You mentioned childhood, like childhood background and different difficult issues like nothing extreme, nothing like no violent abuse or beating or anything like that, but just some childhood issues that were kind of bubbling up in this way and all this fear and anxiety and kind of depression that I was working through last year.
Rav Arora:So I remember when you hit me up and I know we would do a long form conversation I just wasn't in the right headspace to have a conversation like that. That wasn't strictly political, which I know this is not going to be. So I was doing all sorts of different interviews the quick 10 minute, ben Shapiro, the Hill Rising, daily Wire stuff but I was really refraining from doing anything long form or personal, because I knew it would potentially trigger certain things that just wouldn't sit with me the right way, and so that's why I'm glad to finally be here, though, because it's been a good year so far, with a lot of interesting personal progress, so I'm glad to be here and chat.
Aaron Pete:It's a pleasure, so would you mind taking me back? Can you tell me about your family moving here? You have some really interesting stories about how hard your parents worked in order to give you a quality life here.
Rav Arora:Yeah, so parents are from India, from Amritsar, of Sikh background, Although my mom is, she's. Her father was Hindu, but her mom was Sikh. So Hindu and Sikh kind of upbringing. We weren't, I would say, practicing religious people for much of the time. I mean, at certain points my mom and my dad were encouraging certain religious views, but they definitely weren't as strictly enforcing it the way other family members or friends were, but they were very, very hardworking. My dad was driving taxi, Mom was working at a local restaurant in the Wildcat Grill in Rosdale, which you might have been to. Of course, Great food there, and yeah, it's, you know, growing up.
Rav Arora:I would say this is like the most, most surface level out of all the kind of challenges, but one of the ones which it's, on the one hand, it's a surface level thing, but it was very difficult, was the financial issues that we had.
Rav Arora:We almost lost our house, almost went bankrupt or did go bankrupt when we were, when me and my brother were very, very young, and so it was.
Rav Arora:Yeah, it was a challenge at times with putting not not food on the table, but just like growing up, like every Christmas, like we always want, like the big Xbox, PS3 stuff, and we never got it and that was always like a thing, this kind of financial and economic insecurity. That was kind of part of our childhood, which later on did change as my dad founded his new company, Cosmic Data, and it started going really well and obviously, with me being my own journalist now and starting my own company and stuff, things have changed pretty rapidly. But I'll never forget some of those roots where you know you know want something really bad, want to go to different restaurants or get like the new sickest toy, but you know not having enough money for it. It's, it's very, very humbling. I think very, very important to have had that experience in this age of just extreme abundance and just getting everything and Amazon Prime your way through, whatever you want, you know, instant gratification, that kind of stuff.
Aaron Pete:What did you learn from the sacrifices that your parents made for you?
Rav Arora:I think I learned that there is a higher purpose that we should strive for and that sacrifices are necessary to make. So they I mean they sacrifice so much for my brother and myself and my little sister to have a good life, and working tirelessly night shifts, day shifts, multiple my mom was working multiple jobs at one point, and so that's something that I think is very, very important is that resilience and that putting someone else above yourself and working towards giving them a good life over you know, sacrificing your own comfort and your own luxury, which is what they did.
Aaron Pete:What was? What is the story of being an immigrant from your perspective? As somebody who's watched individuals go through this move to a new country, start to try and build roots and connect with the community, I find the immigrant story in a lot of circumstances very inspiring because they're willing to travel to a new country, willing to make sacrifices, but in a healthy country, in good circumstances, there will be opportunity to find your way in that country, despite not having those social connections, and make a better life for your family. How do you think about the immigrant story?
Rav Arora:Yeah, well, I was born in India and then went to London and then came here when I was about four or five. So for me reality has always just kind of started when I was in Canada. I don't really remember being born in, born in India, or living in the UK, but in terms of my parents and what they've had to face and our kind of collective process, I, I mean I will say I have a lot of gratitude for the fact that I have that diversity of background and so I've just I look at reality maybe in a more complex way than someone born in the same environment and their surrounding environment is the same as their home environment and everything aligns, whereas for me it's been mum and dad have had different views and perspectives on social and political and just family issues and the kind of psychological and interpersonal dynamics that we've had, are, you know, have been fairly different from others, I would say, around me that were, you know, caucasian background, born here. And so it's. I mean I will say like the immigrant story is interesting because it selects for a certain kind of hard work and perseverance, like the person who comes from India to Canada or the US or the UK or Australia or whatever, and makes a living and starts from scratch, more or less or not but has to come to a new environment and raise their kids in a novel setting.
Rav Arora:I think that selects for a certain kind of hard work and openness to experience and just just challenging oneself. That, you know, I think does inform the way your kids live and the kind of perspective that they have like they're going to be much more, I think, grateful and have a better understanding of what sacrifice really is right. It's like because, you know, when we came here, like mum and dad working all those jobs and working super hard in a new environment away from their family, like my mum, you know, didn't see her father for I mean decades and he recently passed away. I never met him but you know, for her it's been quite saddening recently, but it's like that level of sacrifice, like she didn't see her dad for how many decades and was solely focused on giving us a good life, it's like wow, like that, the kind of moral courage and resilience to get to a place like that is just, you know, endlessly inspiring, I would say.
Aaron Pete:So do you think that you have greater respect or greater understanding of the human endeavor in comparison to people who grew up here and their parents are just doing their normal nine to five job? Never like you got to see your parents go through things and see their character come out in a different way. Do you think that that shaped your understanding as well?
Rav Arora:Yeah, well, I mean obviously that's not exclusive to just being an immigrant, I mean anyone from any kind of disadvantaged background, like I mean. I mean my circles in elementary and middle school were, I would say most of my friends were fairly well off and on average I was. You know our family was not doing as well as the families of my friends, I would say so there was a bit of a difference there, although that was not always the case. But I suppose I have learned, you know, the hard work ethic in a way that's been quite useful for me, like for however that gets molded or sculpted. I mean there's there's good sides to this, there's bad sides to this.
Rav Arora:I mean there's obviously South Asian culture, which is all about getting good grades, getting your straight A's on your, especially your math and your science, and doing well in school, and if you get a B plus then your dad's mad at you.
Rav Arora:Like there's, I mean that's not the healthiest thing, but it's like growing up with that kind of upbringing did, did kind of select for a certain kind of perfectionism on my part. Perfectionism, diligence, working really hard, trying to be the best I can be, reading lots, using you know, big vocabulary words of something my dad always was encouraging of, so that no doubt played a big role in kind of where I am today is having those parents that really cared about how I did in school and really pushed me to be the best I could be, whereas, you know, many of my other peers not all of them, but some of them didn't have that same encouragement, so I had less of that, that striving for greatness that I had. So that's definitely, I would say, played some role in the way things have progressed for me over the past couple of years.
Aaron Pete:When did you become passionate about being an intellectual thinking complex issues through and saying that that's something that you're interested in? Some people they like building houses and that's fine with them. When did you become passionate about thinking complex issues through and being able to talk about them?
Rav Arora:Yeah, I was probably grade 10 when I had suffered this minor knee injury which ended up being quite chronic, which prevented me from pursuing my biggest passion at the time, which was playing soccer and secondly playing basketball. That's all I cared about was get good grades in school, but after that, soccer and basketball. Soccer and basketball, that's it right. That was just what I lived on. That was kind of my religion to be the best soccer player I could be and eventually become professional. I wanted to become a pro soccer player and play in Europe at some big club.
Rav Arora:But in grade 10, when suddenly I had all this time on me, I just one day walked into Rob Baganovic, who you might know to some degree, depending on which sources you're reading. He's a really good guy and was a great mentor to me. I just kind of fell into his classroom one day. The issue at the time was actually some kind of Middle Eastern conflict. I think it was something happening in Syria and foreign policy stuff. For the first time he just entered in his class and he was talking about it and I took interest in it. What he was saying, and I don't remember the specifics, but he was saying this is being presented in a certain way, but actually what's really going on is X or Y rather than what the media is telling you. I was like, really, can that really be a thing of our perceptions failing us or our perceptions mismatching with what's actually happening on the ground? And what role does the media play? What role do politicians play, being in his classroom spending long hours talking about political and historical issues, particularly BLM and race issues, which, for whatever reason, I was just always interested in those issues, probably because I was a big fan of hip-hop music and listening to, I would say especially Kendrick Lamar, who I think is probably the greatest musician and even just one of the greatest philosophers and literary thinkers of our time, and just hearing his struggle about living in inner city Compton and the legacy of certain historical atrocities versus cultural conflicts and law enforcement and criminal justice and all those kind of issues just were interesting to me.
Rav Arora:I got into that with Mr Boganovich and did this long, deep dive into BLM at the time and I read the. I forget what the book is called now, but it's an orange copy book. It's the kind of the manifesto Black Lives Matter. I remember reading it and long story, but I went through all of it and coming away with a certain impression and then going into each chapter, then critically and fact-checking and being skeptical of different claims and realizing that a lot, if not most, of the claims just fell apart upon critical scrutiny of certain views on race and inequality and disparities and racism. That I think was probably the genesis for what's going on in my world right now is recognizing that there's a lot of trendy ideas about complex topics and a lot of times those trendy ideas just don't match with the reality and things are actually far more complicated than what people say on social media or even the New York Times or the FDA or the CDC. There's a lot of complexity to these big topics.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, Anytime you have a binary, it's probably not either of those. That's somewhere in between. I'm curious about how it also shaped you having a positive influence, Rob Boganovich and then seeing what he went through. Other people might have different perceptions. What's your perception as somebody who's influenced, encouraged and able to be shaped and to move in the right direction? Because so often we can look at somebody, we disagree with their view and then decide that's who they are, but whether you agree with him or not, there's lots of people who might not agree with them. He had a positive influence on you and that can't be removed from the conversation.
Rav Arora:Well, yeah, he had a positive influence on me, but more than that, he's a really good, ethically aligned person. He's one of the most ethical, loving, compassionate people I've ever met. Rob, he's very selfless and he's definitely this kind of hyperintellectual. For him it's like the books, the politics, the issues, reading the facts. He has a bit of that Ben Shapiro-esque demeanor about him. He really cares about the facts and getting things right, but outside of that he's a very good human being and there's not a lot of people like him out there and that's just kind of a fun.
Rav Arora:Well, not fun, but just an interesting kind of example that I have personally just seeing the just absolute defenestration of him in the Chilwag progress and the editor at the time, paul Henderson, and the way certain perceptions about him were created about who he was as this like alt-right crazy guy, like all these things.
Rav Arora:I mean he was most people don't. We would never even imagine this, but he was running I forget the exact name of it, but he was running multiple clubs at CSS that were dedicated to invite students who were bullied for their sexual orientation, their skin color, etc. Like he was doing these clubs to help uplift people who've gone through hard times and discrimination, yet he was seen as the enemy of all things good in this world. So it's an interesting example and I can't really talk much about what's happening currently with him, but it's safe to say that we were in some pretty insane times with how administrations and regulatory bodies and the education system just attacks and cancels and just ruins the lives of people that just want to show both sides of a perspective or show the complexity of a topic and they just want to create safe spaces and not allow any teacher educator to challenge their students or to make them even slightly uncomfortable. But anyway, I won't go into specifics, but Rob is a great guy and he's been very good to me.
Aaron Pete:I'm glad to hear that You've described yourself as having a perennial perspective. I looked it up, I dove into it. I agree with you. I'd be interested if you could describe what that perspective is and when you developed that.
Rav Arora:Yeah, wow, that's a four-hour podcast right there. The perennial conversation you know I to speak personally of how I became interested. So for people who don't know, perennial perspective, aldous Huxley, the famous philosopher, novelist, as well as the psychedelic enthusiast. He popularized this concept in his book, the Perennial Philosophy, which is very, very dense and I feel like I've only scratched the surface of that book.
Rav Arora:But the idea that all, or I would say more accurately, many world religions and myth systems point to something universal that transcends any kind of individual sectarian ideas, that there's some kind of spiritual foundation at the heart of many great religions and myths and allegories. And you know, I've gone back and forth in some ways and went fairly deep into this topic and this is what I do outside of journalism, which most people don't know. So at UFE I've been studying almost entirely religion and philosophy over the past couple years, primarily Eastern religions at the start, but I kind of took a big detour and became very interested in Eastern Christianity last year. So the Orthodox tradition and kind of comparing it to the traditions that we see here and kind of seeing the differences and spending a good amount of time in studying Hinduism and Buddhism, although I mean, it's been a couple years, but I've just barely, just barely, scratched the surface. It's like these things are so complex and deep. It's like you feel like you've read a few things or you've done a few meditations or whatever, but it's like there's just a wellspring of depths in a lot of these traditions that most people just don't understand. And so, to answer your question in a shorter way, I mean it's having grown up in a background of Sikhism and Hinduism to varying degrees, but also going to a summer Bible camp every year, because a lot of our friends, a lot of our neighbors were Christian, and so I always went to a summer Bible camp, or what they called the Vacation Bible School, at the Roswell Traditional as well as other churches in town.
Rav Arora:I kind of got exposed to these different ideas, although never in a very deep or kind of hard hitting way, like I never really identified as Sikh or Hindu or Christian or anything else. I mean I remember praying at various points when I was a kid, but I never had a super strong faith. And then I remember in grade nine or grade 10, I remember just asking my mom like I just I feel like I need something spiritual in my life, and my mom. I mean I guess that speaks to kind of my parents' journey because they also weren't really dogmatically religious because they, you know, when I was a kid I was wearing a turban and so we were kind of brought up Sikh in a kind of a strict way for maybe a couple years or a few years. But then I guess my parents had their own evolution and they became more interested in the Hindu or the Vedic side of things and more interested in yoga and the Vedic side of things. I'm more interested in yoga and breath work and meditation, doing a lot of meditation courses, and I just always had this itch and again I could spend hours, we could spend hours talking about this.
Rav Arora:But I just deeply explored Buddhism, christianity and Hinduism over the past few years and came across some really good mentors, like Ron Dart at UFE, who just retired last year. He's considered probably like the most just decorated, just prolific professors in liberal arts and religious side of things at UFE and it's sad that he retired. But he was just such a great guy who himself was Christian but had a deep understanding of other traditions, and so under him I studied Buddhism and Hinduism and just time after time had certain perceptions broken, just learned new things I didn't know before and came to a more or less perennial view. Not in the sense of all religions are the same and necessarily always point to the same thing, because there are some notable differences between Islam and Christianity and there's the Middle Eastern conflict right now that everyone's talking about right Israel and Palestine but there are vast doctrinal differences and those differences matter because that's what informs the differences and which cultures have differing perceptions on gay rights or women's rights or immigration or apostasy or people leaving and entering the faith and even evangelism and all that kind of stuff.
Rav Arora:But I think there is a common spiritual core to these different religious faiths that can be described as perennialism.
Rav Arora:In that there is.
Rav Arora:I mean, apart from all the differences which are very important and create for very different outcomes at times, particularly, I was going to say, with violence and with different cultures and their perspectives about honor, culture and who should be executed or stoned or versus given due process and that kind of thing I still think there is a common core of just things like surrendering to a higher power, surrendering to some bigger force than ourselves, coming together in community and recognizing the importance of connecting with one another and the power of mystical experience, which unfortunately our culture just completely misses and that kind of, I would say, explains the psychedelic renaissance is that there's a need to have ineffable ego-shattering experiences, and different religions have always had that.
Rav Arora:Whether it's the Sufi traditions within Islam or Advaita Vedanta within Hinduism or different sects of Buddhism or Orthodox Christianity, there's absolutely a need for mystical experience that kind of breaks us out of our ordinary egotistical realities, and so I think a lot of those things point to something bigger. But I'm still in my studies kind of working out the kinks of that and kind of how the differences really pan out and where we can find genuine points of concord and but also key points of divergence which I don't think should be ignored or not talked about due to just political correctness or views of just this kind of myopic view that all religions can kind of get along and all ideas are equally good, all religions are equally good and all point to the same thing, when in reality, like I said, there's a lot of key differences that also need to be talked about.
Aaron Pete:There's a beauty to it in my opinion, because one of my favorites is the flood story, because it's consistent throughout. Indigenous people have a flood story. Christian religions have a flood story. Almost every religion has a form of flood story and we know that a flood actually took place.
Aaron Pete:And so there's this fantastic kind of meeting of reality, the story and what took place, and it's hard to draw the line on how true a religion is If somebody's acting something out, how beneficial that is, like Sumas Mountain that's where all the Indigenous people went 10,000 years ago to avoid the floods. And I find that so fascinating, because we can't draw this line and say this is how true. It's like Indigenous religions or belief systems are 60% true and Christians are 70%. We don't know, when you act these behaviors out in a proper way, how true they can be and how much you can get. And I personally and I'm sure you agree that, like the psychology of a lot of these belief systems is what's the most fascinating what you can pull from it without harming other people, that you can learn from these belief systems, from the stories and the narratives that we can get from it, can add value to your life, regardless of whether or not you believe it literally happened or didn't happen, but I also think that's an interesting area as well.
Rav Arora:Yeah, yeah, I take at least a similar line to Jordan Peterson on some things religious in terms of many religious stories mimicking something deeply wired and just woven into our DNA. Like there's certain stories that speak to us because it speaks to something innate within us about overcoming adversity and that the whole hero's journey of going through various obstacles and finding light within those obstacles and sacrificing various things and overcoming our traumas and battling our anxieties and our worst fears and our conquering our demons Like there's something about those stories, whether they're Christian or Hindu or Buddhist, that we all gravitate towards and I don't think we should just flatten them in the same category, because there are many key differences, but to me, at least from my perspective at this moment in 2023, it's to me there's something universal about those stories that doesn't make any single one of them the obvious dominant one, or the path to follow, which is the kind of conventional religious view that many people have, is like well, jesus is the way, or Buddha is the way, or Muhammad is the way, although I mean Islam actually includes Jesus and other prophets like Moses in their religion, interesting enough, but Muslims will say like their religion is the true religion and there's different versions of that. But at this point in my life and this might totally change, so I don't know but at this point I'm not willing to dogmatically commit to one religion or the other. I'm willing to and I don't think this is actually a bad thing, even though some people think it is but I think I do fully and happily and freely pick and choose what I think are the best ideas, because I think that is really the only way to have a 21st century conversation about human ethics and spirituality and myth systems, not a, not a stone age one.
Rav Arora:I don't think that one religion has all the answers and has everything in it that you need. I think you can pull from the yoga systems within Hinduism and the mystical elements of Islam and the story of Jesus. I think you can find and you can bring the best elements of different religions and learn from them, rather than just picking one. But at this point who knows, I might change my views on that.
Aaron Pete:I think that's a perfectly valid way to approach. It is that you can have a final analysis A at our age and then B throughout life. Your understandings are going to change. In July 11th 2020, you wrote the fallacy of white privilege and how it's corroding our society. How did that article come about? What was it like working through some of these issues?
Rav Arora:It came about obviously in the aftermath of the George Floyd incident and it's funny. It's a good question on a personal level because I almost like, really want to. I really am curious about what I was thinking at that time and what I would have in retrospect, what I would say to that anxious, lost, obsessive, hyper-ambitious but just completely unknown anonymous person at that point which wrote that thing. Like I said, I previously followed and was very interested in the BLM topic and racial differences, racial disparities in criminal justice and crime, policing, economic disparities, etc. And identity politics when George Floyd happened and there was this cultural consensus that white people are privileged in our society and minorities are disadvantaged and that various flavors of this. But at some points you got to just extreme heights of white people bowing down in this kind of not even semi-religious but just religious fashion and just kind of bowing and washing the feet of black protesters and apologizing what I think are complete stone age ideas, like apologizing for something that their ancestors did that they were not responsible for, and it's like the complete absurdity of just like and none of this complexity I think was actually acknowledged of like a low-income white male born to a single mom whose father was a drug addict apologizing or washing the feet of, or kind of expressing this deferential attitude towards a wealthy Ivy League black student at Harvard. It's like like what are we doing? It doesn't make any sense for me to kind of divide things in that kind of identitarian way, because that there are some disparities on average doesn't mean that we should be coloring the way our individual interactions play out. I feel like we should have a fully colorblind attitude in our day-to-day interactions and not just assume that because someone's white, that their life has been great or that their life has just objectively been better than this black person or this Muslim person. It's like the complexity of life just plays out across races and genders and backgrounds and to me that's something that was being completely missed and, perversely, it was actually preventing us from having an honest conversation about real fucking issues like what to do about inner city Baltimore and South side of Chicago, where there's rampant levels of violence and that primarily affects low-income black residents who and this is part of my coverage after the point after that piece interviewing people in Minneapolis All of them happened to be black about how, in the aftermath of George Floyd, police were treated and in some cases were defunded or just their morale was low because of this anti-police sentiment, and their community saw record-breaking levels of violence, ushering in the grim toll of violence in the 1990s. Places like Chicago and Minneapolis saw just horrendous levels of violence and that was not being talked about enough and in some cases, was just not being talked about at all.
Rav Arora:But instead we're talking about white privilege and about law firms and banks wanting to impose or implement racial quotas and want to upgrade their diversity. And because Company X has 8% black people and not 13%, what is the American population? That means that that company, that chemistry lab, is racist because they don't have enough black people. It's like we're completely missing the point. We're just getting distracted by these issues, informed by this corrosive identity politics, and we're not actually talking about real inequality in these communities and what to do about it.
Rav Arora:So that piece was just a, at least in part, a repudiation of that kind of thinking and a advocacy for looking at these issues in a colorblind way, including when race is a variable and acknowledging when racism does actually exist, which in that piece as I outline, that's something that I'd experienced as a kid. I'd experience various forms of racism, mostly, almost entirely all in elementary school, a little bit in grade 8, grade 9. After that it was never a thing. But having experienced that, if suddenly you want to call any inequality racism, it's like that does harm and actually insults people who have actually experienced racism. When you say that any inequality or any disfavorable outcome involving any minority person means that it's the racism or transphobia or homophobia or sexism is always the cause, which I think is just completely wrong.
Aaron Pete:One of the other pieces that you mentioned in the piece that I think is useful to kind of get your perspective on now is that there are communities of Caucasian people who come from wealth, who have their grandparents own slaves, and they are wealthy as a consequence of that. How do you think about that issue? Because that was one of the things you started that piece off with is just acknowledging there are some people who come from this very privileged position in life. You didn't land and end there, you went through other positions, but I'm just curious how do we think about that issue? How do we look at those people who come from that wealth? Because that's, I think, the argument that people are making when they talk about way privilege.
Rav Arora:Yeah, well, the problem is that you can't really draw any racial lines on that, because I mean, if you look at who the highest income groups are in the US, the UK and Canada I mean, if you look at the US in particular, it's it happens to be. You know my ethnicity Indian Americans are by far the highest earners. And then you have, like you know, lebanese Americans, taiwanese Americans. But how do we deal with?
Aaron Pete:those specific people who are from that lineage, because those are the people that people use as scapegoats of like. That's evidence of way privilege. How do we resolve that issue, in our mind that some people did in fact come from a position where they owned other people and use that to gain their wealth and get a benefit over other?
Rav Arora:society members. Yeah, that's a good question and it's I mean there's different ways of looking at that problem of inequality and historical wrongdoing, and it's the problem you, I would say, run into quite frequently when you're looking at which injustices were committed in the past and who's at fault for what. It's well, I mean, again, just to put our foot into the door, not all white people owned slaves, right? And I mean it's like there's this weird sort of Eurocentric perspective that we have here in the West that in history only white people were the privileged ones and that there was nothing else going on.
Aaron Pete:And this is To be clear indigenous people owned slaves prior to colonization. We owned people of our own descent before Caucasian people or anybody else showed up. So I agree with you, but I still don't know what to do with people who come from that position. And if their parents came from that and they use that wealth, how do we look at that? Like there seems like a moral issue with that person.
Rav Arora:Yeah, well, okay, so to finish what I was saying earlier, there's this weird Eurocentric perspective where we don't want to acknowledge or talk about the directions in which this privilege and injustice swings in. I mean, there's, if you look at the, the Muslim slave trade, I mean it was some estimates show that the Muslim slave trade in North Africa, where they took slaves and treated them in the most barbaric, just horrible conditions that when you look at and there's many other examples. But when you look back in history, you won't find anything tidy, where there's the good guys and the bad guys. I mean, even with the transatlantic slave trade, one of the things that I learned with Rob Boganovic was that you had rich African kings selling their black slaves to the Americas, to the European colonizers, in exchange for things like weapons or other mass goods that they needed. And when we look at the American context, which is something you just mentioned, right now is and this is part of my problem with the land acknowledgments issue is that when we want to say, well, this land belonged to this specific tribe, it's like, well, was this land always belonging to this tribe? Or was there actually three different tribes that were vying for this land and they were warring with each other barbarically and one of the tribes ended up winning out and they had this specific land for this amount of time. It's like when you go back far enough, you have all these tribes warring against each other and this idea of this like Aboriginal unity across all areas, and then the white colonizer comes and it's white people versus brown people. It's like that's a childish kindergarten worldview of what actually really happened and none of that absolutely discounts all the injustice and the legacy of, arguably, genocide in the residential schools, what happened.
Rav Arora:But when it comes to what to do with that problem today, it's like again we should be focused on where the inequalities exist today and not punish people or judge them based on their ancestors, because oftentimes some of the most successful groups and again this goes to my earlier point is like you look at Jews in America, right, jewish people. Thomas Sowell talks about this in his book the Great African American Economist. It's like you look at Hollywood, you look at Harvard, you look at different institutions, institutions of power, and Jewish people have done incredibly well. They've overcome great disadvantage and anti-Semitism and ethnic oppression, nazism, all this stuff, this idea that because certain groups have come from advantage and others haven't that we should do something now about what's happening in the past. It's not a clear line, because you're going to find rich, affluent members of the South Asian community that came from tremendous amount of wealth here in the United States and Canada and you're going to find poor people of low-income backgrounds with drug addiction and single motherhood and all these problems that happen to be white, and so it's like, when we're looking at the legacy of slavery and oppression, it really spans across different races. It spans across different backgrounds.
Rav Arora:If you go back to what was happening in certain parts of India and this intersects with certain areas of my family, although at some point I'd love to do a deeper dive it's like the conflict between Hindus and Muslims, and I definitely want to do a deeper dive in history before speaking authoritatively on this. But the level of oppression arguably from Muslims against the Hindus and the Sikhs was immense and in some cases it was the other way around potentially. But it's like you're going far back and it's hard to place clear lines in a way that would make social justice ideas today easy to understand, and that's why I think we should be having a conversation about who's disadvantaged right now and what are the reasons for that? Is it crime? Is it inequality? Is it lack of opportunity? Is it just inner city schools not being funded well enough? Let's talk about that, because if we focus on Can you see how that benefits the perpetrators?
Aaron Pete:though? If we can agree that certain people were terrible throughout history, the argument that we should only focus on the now really benefits the people who did wrong previously, because they're like don't look back there because we're today and so let's just look to the future. That benefits if you were to commit a crime yesterday and say, well, we're just going to wipe this slate clean.
Aaron Pete:Eric Weinstein, on Modern Wisdom, talked about this idea of whoever says let's clear the slate usually has a reason for it, and it's not always a good reason. The logic of let's not look back to the past. There's a lot to learn from that, and there are individuals who were involved in that, and so I'm thinking of, like a literal person comes to you and says I committed, like my family did this, and they stole a bunch of land and they abused people and they had slaves and they didn't care and they were racist and they were hateful that we just look at that person and go, no, you're good, we're only going to look at the future now. That seems like that would benefit that person, continuing to maintain the status quo and ignore past atrocities.
Rav Arora:Like we know, johnny McDonald was a racist and hateful person, and so I'm trying to think of, like what we would do with that person yeah Well, but that's the only way forward and that and you know there's no perfect solution there's no way of just whitewashing you know everything or starting fresh from 2023. But that's just the grim reality of things. I mean my country you know where I'm born from, india suffered through brutal imperialism and British colonialism and India suffered as a result from that. The way the British colonizers came in and just absolutely destroyed parts of India. I mean, india was just much more rich and affluent and just just thriving economically before the colonizers came in, and the rest is history. But it's like, what do we do with that problem right now? It's like it cuts in so many different directions. It's like you go back far enough in your family, your aboriginal background right, are you fully aboriginal?
Rav Arora:Correct. Yeah, so it's like you know it's. I mean, you can tell me better than I can, obviously, but it's like, theoretically, there are other aboriginal tribes that did wrong to your tribe, right? I mean, have you looked at that?
Aaron Pete:before. Yeah, yeah. So it's like the Kwak-Wa-Ka-Wa-Ka, where they came to Stolo territory and put heads on pikes.
Rav Arora:Yeah, so some of your ancestors were involved.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, victims of that Stolo people have been considered very peaceful people for thousands of years, but other communities, to your point, were absolutely abusive and used their power and influence for negative things.
Rav Arora:Right, yeah, and that's horrifying. I mean, like your little ancestors were put on sticks and you're like yeah wow, that's insane.
Rav Arora:So again. So it's like, should those people, like, how do we treat those people? Descendants of those tribes and descendants of you know full people of full British European background who you know once upon a time oppressed my ancestors in India? It's like, how do I have a conversation with, like is it worth going back far enough and saying, oh, your ancestors actually came into fucking southern India and did this thing and you know, my ancestors suffered as a result of that? Or do we have a conversation of right now, because I personally think that that's just a dead end. You know, going that far back it's not that we shouldn't talk about those things or shouldn't care about them, but when it comes to solutions and it comes to actually treating each other on an individual level, it really matters what's going on now. So it's not all the while having sympathy and empathy for all in the complex history of different people, but if we're looking at I mean I go back to this point again if we're looking at what to do about south side of Chicago or the reserves right now, you know, in different parts of Canada, just talking about white supremacy, you know, in your liberal arts college degree, is not the solution. It's like what kind of treaties can we broker? What kind of policies can we implement now that are informed by that historical perspective? But don't, you know, don't punish people of you know, descendants of a certain background, and don't preferentially privilege everyone of a certain background on the other side.
Rav Arora:This is why I have a problem with affirmative action on principle and again, this like idea of like we as a company, we want to hire more minority people to uplift them, and so we're going to have, you know, 30% of our employees are going to be, you know, black and brown and Chinese, and we're going to have 50% women.
Rav Arora:And like no, the best talent should come to the top and the best people should be selected. And if you're seeing differences in you know, drug abuse, mental health issues, you know economic disparities in, you know, in a place like Chicago, the solution isn't to focus on slavery and to implement reparations, which I don't think actually would do much help. By the way, this is one of the things also Thomas soul talks about is like fixing complex historical problems is not as easy as just giving money away. Right, so, like your residential areas, aboriginal reserves it's like if you just gave them, you know tens of thousands of dollars and just said Okay, we apologize for everything we did. Here's a 200k check for every individual community. Is that going to fix problems?
Aaron Pete:I can give you a literal example. We were my community was, so, if you know, the Seabird area, that used to be seven communities particular gathering point, and so we were all given $15,000 as payment for that, instead of investing in social programs. Here's the problem, though you either give people $15,000 to put in their pocket or you put in a band council that may misspend the money and waste it away, so the person doesn't actually get any benefit. So it's not clear to me, unless you have good governance, that that money would be better allocated to the band doing something with it, because not in all circumstances is the band the right people to manage that money. Sometimes it is the individual, and so, to your point, almost everybody from our community ended up spending the money, and they have nothing to show for it, and they likely don't even know that it was for Seabird Island and that they would be given this money for a specific reason of a specific wrong that took place. But getting communities out of the circumstance to your point is incredibly complex, and the space does need to be held that people were put behind the eight ball. They have no idea that they were put behind the eight ball and they have no idea what getting out would look like if they were to. And so we're trapped in the circumstance and it feels like right now we're at the point of like just acknowledging where people are. And, to your point, working as a native court worker, working with people in the criminal justice system who are indigenous, often I hear where's my native lawyer, where's my indigenous this, where's my indigenous judge, where's my like? And it's like right, you hit somebody, you beat the crap out of somebody like you committed a crime. You don't get the plentiful nature of our system just because you're indigenous. You need to take responsibility for your actions and actually take the steps to move out of their circumstance.
Aaron Pete:The question then becomes how do we make sure we fund these resources to get people out of those circumstances, which is, to your point, like West Side of Chicago? How do we get people out of that? And it seems like just focusing on prong one, which is truth, like this happened to your ancestors, and this is maybe why you're behind the eight ball doesn't actually result in any improvement, but there does seem to be some space needed for that. So people have that mercy that they know that it's not because they're a loser and a failure and not enough. And being an indigenous person, like most people know that indigenous people are on the side of the road on drugs, homeless, so going into an interview, I'm not going to look the same.
Aaron Pete:When they think of an indigenous person as a Caucasian person who they might not be able to think of, that person on the street struggling with homelessness, they might not think of the reserves, they might think that I'm coming from this edgier place and so I don't agree with this affirmative action.
Aaron Pete:But I don't know what solutions exist to encourage people to think outside the box, because I don't represent every indigenous person, but the average person. If you were to see an indigenous person apply, you might have those things pop up in your mind, which is what I also hesitate about us focusing too much on the atrocities. Then all you know me for is crime rates, statistics on education levels, all those things, which is not who I am and not who many of my community members are. But you get these kinds of things and that can disadvantage people further and I don't know how to square this. But I do see the attempt of affirmative action like we had it at my law school and it gave some people who'd have never gone to law school the opportunity to be there in this space and learn some things that they would have never had access to. One of my favorite classes was taxation of corporations. You wouldn't have gotten that opportunity had you not had affirmative action to allow somebody from a reserve to take that course and learn about those topics.
Rav Arora:Right, well, was that the question that becomes? Were those people from the reserve not going to make it to that university anyways? Likely not Like their grades were too low.
Aaron Pete:Yes, I imagine, probably like 3.5 when you need a 4.2. Right, and so that doesn't mean the person's an idiot, but that does mean that if they were to apply through the normal stream, they probably wouldn't get in Right, but they would still get into some school, like if you're doing well, you can get into a decent college, right.
Rav Arora:It's not like there's no college, it's a regular college, but not law school.
Aaron Pete:Like law school, you'd have a four year degree and you'd need a 4.2 GPA to get in.
Rav Arora:Yeah.
Aaron Pete:And so some people are just normal people are not going to get that, and so that opens the door of a different pathway in for them to bring that knowledge back to their community to get out of poverty.
Rav Arora:Right, yeah, but the thing is that also brings various problems with it too. I mean, is a rich? I mean I and this is something Coleman Hughes talks about yeah, it's a prominent young black intellectual. It's like giving affirmative action to someone like him. So he happened to go to Columbia, a wealthy environment, you know. Parents were encouraging him to do well in school and he was. I think he describes his upbringing as middle class. There was no poverty and he didn't live, you know, south Side of Chicago or Baltimore or any kind of inner city area. I think it was in Virginia he grew up in. It's like for him affirmative action doesn't make sense. But because he's black, he got preferentially, you know, or I don't know if he did, but someone like him would be preferentially selected. But why Like? But?
Aaron Pete:like in law school, they have you write a letter saying why you should be chosen for the program. Okay, it's not like just you check the black box and you get in. You have to tell why your story is unique and in such a way that you would deserve to have a seat in law school.
Rav Arora:Right, but then that's just a colorblind solution and eventually it's like anyone who's come from. I mean, if the criteria is you come from hardship, then you know, regardless of skin color, someone who's come from drug addiction and crime and their father beat the shit out of them and you know whatever, or their mother passed away, it's like, then that's the person we should be selecting for it doesn't. Skin color is not the variable, then it's disadvantage.
Aaron Pete:But we can point to specific things for like indigenous communities, like Indian residential schools, the 60s scoop and other policies that would have impacted indigenous people specifically, that would give you rise to think that they, their specific circumstance, was due to government assimilation.
Rav Arora:Yeah, yeah, I mean there. I think there are, by the way, differences between you know the conversation the United States with black Americans and the indigenous conversation, and I think there's some big differences in just recent history and just how things have panned out. And I'm not I mean I'm generally against these kind of affirmative action policies because I think if universities selected for you know they want, you know some students of disadvantaged backgrounds experienced hardship historically in their, in their family, you're going to automatically include people from indigenous backgrounds because a lot of them are disadvantaged when they're applying. But you're also going to include disadvantaged Chinese students and white students and black students and Indian students who also came from disadvantaged backgrounds. And you're capturing a wider net and not discriminating against the poor white guy whose dad was addicted to drugs and mom beat the shit out of him and you know his little brother passed away from some disease.
Rav Arora:It's like you're actually including that guy and you're not preferentially boosting a, you know a middle class well off. You know parents love them, have all their basic needs covered, indigenous kid child who you know had a GPA of whatever 3.9, had all the luxuries he needed and but he simply got selected because of his skin color. But that's you know to your point about if you're selecting for people of disadvantage, as you know, not. Not that anyone who's disadvantaged should go to Harvard you should get a ticket to Stanford but that there is some value in having people of different backgrounds. I think that's a race neutral thing, not a race specific one at all.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, working as a native court worker, I often comment that there should be somebody in the court system assisting everybody through that process signing them up for counseling, getting them access to resources, making the process clear, helping them apply for legal aid, getting them supported so they can get out of the criminal justice system. This shouldn't just be for Indigenous people, because often, to your point, like there's lots of Caucasian people and people from all different backgrounds who are have the exact same kind of journey through atrocity and challenge and adversity that just need a leg up. And it should be race neutral, yeah, but I think there's this balance that has to be struck because the Indigenous circumstance in Canada is so unique.
Rav Arora:Yeah.
Aaron Pete:And the reserve system is, like by my standard, designed to impoverish people because you don't own your land, so you can't sell your land for profit, where you would be able to move into a more affluent community.
Rav Arora:Yeah, I think being race neutral means that you're targeting the greatest places of disadvantage and of discrimination. If there are specific places where there are and again this is kind of the difference between the American context and the Canadian one but you talk about specific cases of injustice and discriminatory government policy in the past 50 years, in this particular reserve at this time, or this residential school, at this point in history, we can target that disadvantage because that was a human evil and that was barbaric and racist and racist and completely wrong and just violates all our core norms and when we should, if there's a way to correct that, we should correct that. But that's but again, that's not a race, but there's nothing to do with being of a certain skin color. This is disadvantage. And if those Indigenous reserves instead were people from Ireland, we would focus on that as well. It doesn't matter if they're you know what shade of skin color they are, but we want to focus on past injustice and if there's a specific instance of that that we can correct, then we should absolutely correct it.
Rav Arora:But right now what you have is this broad overcorrection where you end up, you know, privileging and preferentially selecting many people of great privilege and luxury and who don't need a leg up, a leg up. And then you create this other problem too, which Heather McDonald, great writer, author, has talked about this kind of diversity mismatch, where you end up preferentially selecting someone who you know wasn't qualified for Harvard but a really good school, but you send them to Harvard and they're really struggling because they weren't prepared for Harvard, but because they were black and have a certain background, you put them in Harvard and, next thing you know it, they're struggling as a result. So you've actually not helped them by you're doing this virtuous thing, but they actually would have had a better time being at the top of their class in maybe a lower school. That isn't Harvard because, you know, let's face it, not everyone here is Harvard material. So there's that problem as well that I think these race specific policies create oftentimes more problems and end up, you know, punishing Asians, in some cases too.
Rav Arora:Right In the US you've had these cases where Asian students have been protesting and saying that we're, you know, being a deboosted, or we're not being, or we're being discriminated against because we're, you know, getting into Harvard at such high rates and Harvard wants more black and Hispanic individuals and you know, so it's again. It's like you target merit and you target need and you focus on disadvantage. You're going to have a far cleaner and better time and you're just going to execute some of these virtuous ideas better than if you say everyone, black disadvantage, white people privileged.
Aaron Pete:The other example is the pretendians in Canada who, like one of our health ministers, pretended to be indigenous in order to get that leg up and get that opportunity. And I'm trying to forget, it was a presidential candidate, elizabeth Warren.
Rav Arora:Oh yes.
Aaron Pete:Who said she was indigenous or of like native descent, in order to move up in her career.
Rav Arora:Yeah, then there was this case, rachel Dolezal. She is this white professor, I think, who, well, she had some level of blackness in her DNA and she exploited that. You know her from an ancestral tree and yeah, so you see that you know wielding the privilege card of who you know this kind of oppression Olympics is, gad Sad says like who's more oppressed? It's like it's again that that game to me is totally toxic and shouldn't be played at all. Yeah, because a lot of those things aren't good proxies for disadvantage and for suffering, right? Just because you're black and you're bisexual doesn't mean, you know, you're automatically suffering more than if you're white and you're straight or if you're a, you know a Muslim woman, who's you know whatever was trans. It's like we should be focusing on people who are really disadvantaged, not just people who fit a certain criteria box that you know is kind of exploited and used to advance certain narratives about race and gender that I think are just totally toxic.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, I got to guest host Tara Henley's show, lean out, and one of the topics was DDI, and one of the topics we were exploring was that this also ends up curtailing and focusing on political ideologies you select for the people who are going to regurgitate so you don't get diversity of ideas. You end up with diversity of skin color but not diversity of ideas, and that that ends up being another problem that we start to face.
Rav Arora:Yeah, and another thing I should just say quickly too is Dr Glenn Lowry runs a great sub stack. He's an incredible economist. I've done his podcast before and he focuses on black issues and one of the things he says is that we should be focusing on the development of disadvantaged communities, not this sort of top down. You know we're the we're, you know HSBC and you know we're a bank and we are. I think they're closing down, or Scotiabank and we want to impose. You know, we want. You know whatever percentage of the population is Aboriginal. Do you know what that is?
Aaron Pete:Is it 4.3%?
Rav Arora:Yeah, okay. So it's like we want 4.3% Aboriginal employees. That, to me, is the wrong way of doing it. It's rather, if you have enough qualified Aboriginal employees, they will find them, assuming these places aren't bastions of racist bigotry, which they're most likely not, which is another problem. These accusations get thrown out of places being sexist or racist just if they have any disparity along racial or gender lines.
Rav Arora:But we should be focusing on, you know, the legacy of residential schools and how that's impacting certain communities right now and what we can do to help those communities, and whether it's social workers or counseling or dealing with addiction problems.
Rav Arora:Or, you know, funding things better or sending more individuals who can, you know, be good mentors in that community. And, you know, leading youth away from crime and drugs and into education and, you know, leading a good life. That's the way out of many of these problems. Not we're Harvard and we want X percent black employees, but rather what can we do in the south side of Chicago to uplift students of this community where crime is rampant and drugs are rampant and fatherlessness is also rampant, and so like that's much more important than the latter because you'll, or the former because you might even achieve the former. You might have at your company, you know, 4.3% Indigenous employees and you might, you know, implement that everywhere. But have you really solved core, fundamental issues in some of these problems, some of these communities? And the answer is no, you'll achieve some racial quota and that might have helped some people. But to get at the root cause of the problem, I think is much more important.
Aaron Pete:So the other thing that I'm thinking of is this like I agree with you 4.3%, anything is like that's just not a good goal because you're doing it arbitrarily. But I do think there's a problem. If we're talking about banks. I'd like did you put the application process out to add the band office at the reserve? Because you might put it up at City Hall, you might put it on City Hall's website, but you didn't put it up. But the Indigenous community, so they don't even know about the opportunity. So there's a risk there.
Aaron Pete:And then I would also say the challenge with certain communities I'll use the reserves in Canada as an example is that your neighbors aren't doctors, lawyers, judges, bank tellers, so you don't have anything.
Aaron Pete:Your children don't have anything to aspire to go. I want to be like my next door neighbor who's a doctor, and so those people getting that opportunity also encourages this idea that hey, they have a nicer lawn than me, hey, they like you kind of get into that. And obviously going down just purely, I mean materialistic path isn't good, but seeing other people succeeding is a really valuable thing. And hiring people on reserve and showing the benefits of a good quality job can encourage people to get off of social assistance and start to take up their mantle and show their impact. And so 4.3%, no, but I think there is value in making sure that there is that representation so that Indigenous people can show that they're capable. Like it means something to me personally when I come through at McDonald's and I see an Indigenous person working there and doing a good job, because then it's like okay, like you're showing the world that you can do a good job at this and we're capable, competent people just like everybody else. And I think there's that balance that still needs to be strong.
Rav Arora:Yeah, but yeah. But that balance, in my view, is not to be achieved through government mandates of having X percent. That's a development problem, that's a, you know, having policies and having solutions that target communities of disadvantage rather than top down. And oh, look, how many brown people we have Well problem solved. It's like, well, no, not really man.
Rav Arora:There's people in the reserves that are really suffering and we should be focusing our resources there as much as we can, although there's one other important point is this kind of tragic vision of humanity is like liberals and progressives tend to be, um, tend to be more interested in uplifting people out of poverty, and they're more there's some studies showing more optimistic, more interested in real change and transformation. And I would say, on a personal, psychological level, that's kind of where I think of things. It's like how can I be the best person I can be? How can I, you know, experience transformation and help others transform? But there is this reality of like you you can impose again, because a lot of this conversation we're talking about is what we as a society can do to impose things or to implement solutions to help these communities. But there's this other variable that doesn't get talked about as well is what's happening in these communities themselves as well. Right, it's like, are there, you know, individual leaders and mentors in that community that are, you know, telling their and this is not race specific at all, but like, are they telling their youth to stay away from drugs and, you know, encouraging education and making you know science and mathematics sexy and not, you know, you know, living a criminal lifestyle or selling drugs.
Rav Arora:It's like you can put in all the government policy you want and fund all these places, all you want and try to help, but decades of abuse and trauma have to be on some level internally reformed and there's a, there's a, there's a clear direction for where government can play a role.
Rav Arora:But government can fix anything. That's kind of one of the social justice fallacies that I've luckily kind of learned about the reading Thomas soul is that government can fix everything. Right. There has to be the internal reform, a kind of psychological transformation, a, a evaluation of one's values and what's important or is family. You know certain cultures value family more than others and Asian cultures particularly have stronger family units. The, the, the, the valuing of family in Asian cultures is far greater than what we see here in certain Western secularized communities and that has differing outcomes across different domains, and so it's there's clear conversation to be had about values and about psychology and about you know, you can even talk about religion and ethics that also lead to different outcomes. It's not just a conversation about government policy, I think.
Aaron Pete:I tend to agree with that on the average circumstances. But I'm on council for my community and I've done that for the past year and one of the things I've been exposed to is the reality that you have to start there for some of these communities. Because, specifically for my community, we have 89 homes. All of them were derelict by my standard, like I wouldn't be willing to live with them. If you stayed in there for a couple of hours, you'd start to notice that you've got a headache because there's so much mold in the house.
Aaron Pete:And so when their parents are alcoholics and their parents parents are alcoholics and their neighbors are alcoholics and their neighbors on the other side are alcoholics and everybody in their community gets drunk every, every night, how would that child ever get out of that circumstance?
Aaron Pete:Like, no amount of like, grit, of like I want to get out of the circumstance is going to connect you because even if you go over to your neighbor's house or across the street or to your right or to your parents or to your grandparents, nobody's going to tell you how to fill out a university application, nobody's going to know how to do something like that, how to apply for a job, how to write a resume. So internally we have to develop our government to a certain point where, if they came to the band office, there would be somebody in that building who could start to move them in the right direction. To your point, it has to be on the individual level, like they have to be willing to take those steps for themselves. But right now, if they were to go to anybody in the community, they'd be clueless and nobody would give them a better direction.
Aaron Pete:And so at that point not even like any schools or community centers in those areas like the schools on reserve, have a similar population, so they're going to face similar challenges people who've not gone beyond. So if you were like, how do I become a doctor, that person's not going to know how to answer that.
Rav Arora:Sorry, sorry, like there's elementary and secondary schools, but you're saying they're of a lower quality. They don't have teachers that are, as informed, correct but, by the way, are those teachers going to be indigenous, by the way, or are they going to be of different? Like I said, monitored under the Chilwax school district?
Aaron Pete:No, seabird is independent, so they don't answer the local school district?
Rav Arora:Are their teachers all indigenous?
Aaron Pete:Many of them are. And then the influences are like you obviously bring in cultural liaison to are also indigenous to help teach those courses, so you're getting an even more indigenous lens to that.
Rav Arora:Interesting and I wonder, are they?
Aaron Pete:The students rate for indigenous people at school even if there are those people is 43%. So the students aren't even attending the classes to begin with because they're seeing what life is like and they're modeling the behavior they're seeing in their community.
Aaron Pete:So, certain communities are turning the surrounds to. Halis is an excellent example but they're bringing in outside influences of people who are not from their community to start to educate and support their community and their development and it's taken them 20 years to roll out some of those programs to start to deliver different results. But for my community specifically, like attend, like in council meetings, our conversations are students are attending their school. So even if there were those good influences, they don't even know because they don't even know to ask those questions. And when you're 13, like I wasn't a good student when I was 13.
Aaron Pete:Like I wasn't on the right time, so I can't tell them like, oh, you should be looking for how to be a better person when you're 13. When I was not on that right path. But it seems like once they go so far in, then they're on drugs and they don't even have a vision for their life. And some of them didn't even develop that vision of like I want to be a lawyer one day or I want to be a doctor. They just never even had that glimmer of hope that their life could be anything other than what their neighbors was, which is alcohol use.
Rav Arora:Right, yeah, and the well. The question, then, is what? What kind of solutions can be implemented there From my perspective?
Aaron Pete:it's like I can apply for funds from Indigenous Services Canada for about $120,000 to get their home fixed. Because, like, the first step is like you need to be able to be in your home and not like we have people with like they're getting kidneys removed because they're 13 years old and they've lived in this house their whole life and it's just an awful quality. Then it's helping their parents get a job, and we need programs that actually work. And, to your point, we use statistics. Did this program create a different result? Like, did it actually function?
Aaron Pete:And we don't do that in Indigenous communities. We've had the same program and it runs every year and we have no idea if anybody ever gets a job and we just keep doing it. And so we need programs that actually work and use professors and educators who understand the literature to help come in and make sure that when we do an employment program, that it actually delivers results. My mom took a cooking course and then never used those cooking tools ever again. She was born with fetal alcohol syndrome as a consequence of her mother going to Indian residential school and facing abuse, and so I am the first out of two generations to start to turn things around and improve things for not only her but for my community around me.
Aaron Pete:And I'm the first to get a full four year education, the first to get a law degree, and some of those were with the support of affirmative action programs.
Rav Arora:Right, yeah, yeah, well, that's it's like catering to problems like that. It's it's it's very I mean, on some level it's very complicated, because how do you actually enact deep transformation in those communities? And it's like, obviously there's there's some role for the government to play, like I said, but then there's also the role of the individual communities, and I'm, you know, I wish I was an expert on social science, I could recommend solutions. But those, I mean, I I want to be hopeful that there are sociologically, economically tested programs that would be effective. I don't know if you've looked into that, but I'm hopeful that there might be something like that. Yeah, but there can be further efforts made on a government level to fix those problems. But, but, but that goes along with and can itself be the corrective for those problems, when there is the role of culture and just behavior to play in those communities. Like, how, if we have all the government programs there that are designed to be effective, how, how do you fix, you know, the levels of abuse and alcoholism in those communities?
Aaron Pete:Right.
Rav Arora:And you know, is it. Is it counseling services? Is it the encouragement of different religious communities or ideas? Or, you know, encouraging certain spiritual programs or mentorship programs for young youth to have, you know, successful men to look up to and to teach them how to you know behave and be civilized and how to you know conduct themselves in a world that is difficult and hard and harsh. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's.
Rav Arora:Unfortunately, these problems are much more complex than the social justice conversation tends to be Like, like this level of conversation we're having, well, again, without my, you know, without having any expertise on which programs work and which and I'm curious, by the way, if you've done any research into which programs might work or not. But it's like this is much more different than saying that a whole population is privileged and the others is disadvantaged and oppressed and that, you know, universities should be, and universities and schools should be, imposing racial quotas to help fix that problem, when in reality it's a deep psychological, spiritual, behavioral problem that has so many layers of historical atrocity and injustice built into it that not only is it addressed on a kind of superficial identity politics level, but often can even make that worse by encouraging mindsets of a victimhood and of this kind of waving the flag of fixing a problem when in actuality you haven't actually done that much.
Aaron Pete:The reason that I find it so interesting is because there's a deep hate I have for like a John A MacDonald, because he did it perfectly. If you wanted to destroy a society, a community, you would do what he did. He removed our language so we can't talk in cultural terms. The elderly people had to hide on, like at St Mary's in Mission. There's one lady who's the only fluent speaker, elizabeth Phillips, who still speaks the language. She's the last person she had to go hide on the back of the reserve in order to speak her language, to keep that alive, and she had no idea why she was doing it at the time. But she continues that all the way to this day and she's the only one left in our area who still speaks the language.
Aaron Pete:People are working to try and revive the culture, but it's, I would say, the big difference between indigenous people and like black communities in the US is they gathered around certain cultural icons. You might not agree with them, but Jay-Z, beyonce, like there were people and you go, wow, maybe I could be that person. Who the heck do you look to? In indigenous culture, where you're like, that person is like a hero. They're killing it and it's because they removed all of that. They did that for a hundred years, and so there's nobody left to look up to the people we do think of. Maybe you think of Jodie Wilson or Abel. Well, she's in that governmental system that maybe you'd agree or disagree with, and so you've kind of lost that connection with. Maybe you want to be her, but who's the singer that you think of when you think indigenous? Who's the rapper? Who's the intellectual author.
Rav Arora:I mean, are there?
Aaron Pete:There definitely are, but they're not.
Rav Arora:Jay-Z or Jordan Peterson, or Jordan Peterson, or that influence.
Aaron Pete:So it's harder to look and go. Hey, maybe I can go be that guy one day, maybe I can play music like this person. And even the talk in indigenous communities is so often go to the government. And so to your point, like we have to have this, like screw applying for the next grant. We need to rebuild here and not worry about what other people are doing. We need to rebuild, right, but we need a certain amount of that money to even get started the value of land like Chiakton's rebuilding, and they're using that money to invest in counseling programs, which is genius Squiola.
Aaron Pete:Here in Chilliwack they did the Walmart. They're taking that funds, they're reinvesting it into growing their community and offering their own schooling system that's separate from the regular SD33 kind of system, and so they're doing things that are unique. But it's also because they're in an urban environment. My community can't copy what they did, because we just don't have the people that would come and use the Walmart out in hope, where nobody lives, in order to do the same thing. So we have to come up with new strategies and sometimes utilize the pipeline, and I do not agree with how Indigenous people are framed in the pipeline conversation because most of us are taking that money, giving it some to our community members and some trying to build community resources to improve circumstances. But I must move on from this topic.
Rav Arora:Yeah, I'll just say one other thing too on. That is, lastly, is just like all of this conversation, I think, absolutely needs to be bracketed in just utmost sympathy and compassion for people in that circumstance and what they went through, and which is why I think it's absolutely vital and crucial to study the residential schools and look at the horrors with an open mind, with just utmost care and dedication to helping those people on an individual level, whether that's your neighbor or people you went to school with. I mean, there were at least a couple of people, one in particular individual who I went to school with an Indigenous background, who really really suffered in many different ways, and actually I haven't thought about this in a while, but there was an effort made on the part of myself and a couple of other friends to really help him and it just didn't work, unfortunately. I mean, he was such a good friend of ours and he was very diligent, working very hard, very athletic, but just after high school just kind of collapsed and fell into drug addiction, like really serious drug addiction, suicidality, getting involved in the criminal justice system, and it was just really tragic to see that happen and I wish there was, there was some alternative to that, but we tried and it failed. But I should probably reach out to him again.
Rav Arora:It's been a few years, but I feel like people on an individual level should do what they can and try to help those that are suffering around them, and knowing that the starting point for them is much more different than their own starting point and everyone has their own starting point, and there's no again, this doesn't cut across any smooth racial lines of who's starting at which place, right, but there are people that are starting at a lower point than you are, and whether that's white, black, chinese or indigenous and specifically indigenous in our case, because that was such a horrible atrocity committed by the European colonizers and the government at the time. So I encourage people to look for community level and personal solutions to some of these problems and really help out, because in some ways, that is all we have on our day to day basis is like, regardless of when some government policy gets implemented or not and whether it's effective, and really taking on showing other people that you love them and care for them and you want the best for them, I think is absolutely necessary.
Aaron Pete:That's very well said. What was the reaction to this piece? The fallacy of white privilege and how it's crowding our society.
Rav Arora:It was, depending on who you talk to. It was one of the best things written in recent times or one of the most idiotic, racist, crazy, all right things written. So it depends who you're talking to and which political orientation they have.
Aaron Pete:Can you remember what it was like hitting the like? I assume you sent it off to the end and it was published separately, but when it came out, how you felt about it and then what the initial reaction was, based on your own experience?
Rav Arora:Yeah, so after publishing it it was just being floated all across the web. Someone was talking about it in the kind of IDW, politically active kind of contrarian circles. Lots of people saw it, read it, supported it. You know Ben Shapiro, sam Harris, I think Jordan Pearson might have seen it. I think Mikaela I definitely saw it. That's how I got on Mikaela's podcast after that point. But the-.
Aaron Pete:What did that mean to you? Because then we'll get to the negative stuff. But what was that like to experience?
Rav Arora:It was like just this lightning bolt of healthy pride and just reaping the rewards of my actions and my hard work was like, oh wow, like I can put in the hard work for this thing and it can really pay off in a deep, in a very deep and meaningful way. I can spend hours and hours writing this thing and lots of people are going to respond to it in a well, meaningful way, and it was just well. It was just for the first time I'm like learning that, oh crap, I can write. I can write something and it actually can be good and informative and help shape people's perspectives. And so right away that kind of light bulb started ringing in my head like oh, wow, okay, I can be good at this. And so then I started writing more and more and doing some podcasts and just kind of fell into this career of writing on controversial topics that I really care about and presenting a narrative that defies any kind of simplistic political agendas.
Aaron Pete:Interesting, and what was the negative response to it? What was that experience like? Because then you go on to write what it's really like to be canceled and how I overcame it.
Rav Arora:Yeah, the response in certain other areas was just like what the fuck are you doing, man?
Rav Arora:Like really like this is what you're doing. And there was one friend in particular that I highlighted in that piece a year later of this, one friend who was just so close to me, who I really cared for and really enjoyed his company and really enjoyed laughing and goofing off and being fun with him. He was just such a good friend. But he and I just got into this very brief back and forth over the BLM stuff and he was just like well, black people are oppressed and the police is roundly executing black citizens with their skin color. And I was like, well, I don't think that's quite true, and here's the data and here's why I differ.
Rav Arora:And he just blocked me suddenly and a bunch of other people that I thought were friends or allies or people who cared for me or supported me, just unfollowed and didn't want anything to do with me again. And that was that was. That was quite saddening and it took some time for that to really settle in because I thought some of those people might come back and, you know, might try to restart some kind of friendship or apologize, but some of those people just really didn't want to come back and just kind of went their ways and that was and that was quite painful for some amount of time was like wow, like this political division can lead to friendships broken. So yeah, that's kind of what happened.
Aaron Pete:Did it surprise you that people could decide this based on like a thought, like it's a thought. It's not a tangible thing, it's a perspective you have. It doesn't seem like it's not like you pushed him out of your car and drove away Like you didn't do something to him. It's the thought in your head that he doesn't agree with. That has nothing to do with whether or not you go grab ice cream. Did that surprise you?
Rav Arora:Right, yeah, on some level it just kind of shocked me. Like you know, we were good friends from grade seven to grade 12 and a bit afterwards and suddenly that amount of time you know whatever six, seven years that just all got through, that all just got thrown into the trash can and disregarded and all that mattered was this political difference and one friendship is completely blown apart. That, to me, just showed this evangelical, aggressive and punitive strand of social justice advocacy that so many people take on in universities and high schools where they feel deeply passionate about this idea. And if you deviate even slightly from you know putting young teenage girls on puberty blockers or reparations, or you know BLM or take your pick then suddenly you're a heretic and you should be looked down upon and you should be, you know, viewed as this, like you know, this person that should not be associated with and should not be respected.
Rav Arora:It's like a lot of these ideas contain this big emotional charge where suddenly you can't have a conversation anymore and you're just seen as an outlier, as a lower caste, and you're therefore, you know discriminating and you know perpetuating this kind of evil and discriminatory hatred that you're trying to fight in a different way, like you want to help black people and help trans people, but someone who has questions about the science or efficacy of vaccines or, you know, puberty blockers or reassignment surgeries for transgender people, you know they have a different reading of the data and you just hate them and think they're evil and discriminatory, when you know they love people just as much as you do, but you're, you know, casting these, these people into this, you know, category of just untouchables. And that that's just been immensely educational for me over the past few years is like seeing how these ideas, you know, collectivize and congeal and become this kind of rigid ideology where if you question it then you're just hated.
Aaron Pete:I have a lot of sympathy for the situation that you were in September 4th 2021, because, on the one hand, you're being recognized by people I'm sure you admire, by people you respect, you're being invited on these shows, but in your own social circle you've lost a friend, you've lost some of the community of people you've known for a long period of time. How did you process this period of your life?
Rav Arora:It was very difficult and there was a lot of personal issues I was talking about a bit before, which I won't get into now, but I suspect at some point I'll talk about some of the personal issues that I've navigated a lot of traumas and anxieties and fears that I've been working on in therapy. It's reminded me of the conversation we just kind of closed the loop on. It's like working on those personal issues and feelings of depression and low self-esteem and chronic anxiety, like really chronic anxiety, just to a debilitating level. I had to take ownership for those specific problems because that was the only way out. My parents had kind of reached their limits and what they could do and you reach a certain age and you're like, okay, my mom doesn't have all the answers. In fact some of the answers may not be the best and she's amazing.
Rav Arora:But I need to find my own path now and transcend my environment and look beyond my specific upbringing and see what else is out there For me going to therapy, working a little bit of psychedelics here and there, finding really good mentors and people that I care about, people that care about me and want the best for me, certain religious communities and spiritual communities.
Rav Arora:Immersing myself in certain areas was absolutely the only way out for what I was dealing with and what I'm still dealing with to some degree, but it was really reaching out and finding good people and mentors and good, positive healing ideas that could help me navigate the challenges that I was working through. For all the bad that we've talked about, there's been, I would say, a lot of good in just how many people really care about me and people that I found that have been mentoring me, checking in on me, and people that I go to for help, for therapy or just having a conversation about issues that I'm going through. That's just been incredibly transformative over the past couple of years is finding the right people and accessing the right ideas and the right corrective behaviors and just recalibrations of how I look at myself and my traumas and my anxieties. I have a lot to be thankful for in that regard.
Aaron Pete:Beautiful. I'm very worried about Bill C-11, bill C-16. I'm worried about the censorship in Canada. I'm worried about the CRTC. The thing that I worry about more right now is self-censorship. I thought the piece that you wrote about what it's really like to be canceled it really touches on this. It's easier to stay quiet. It's easier you don't risk anything. It feels like so many people when I talk about. I hate land acknowledgments. I think they're stupid. I don't think they're useful. I don't indigenous communities we don't do them. That's not what we want.
Rav Arora:You guys don't do them either.
Aaron Pete:No, it's just not what we ever asked for. It's done in educational institutions, but it's not something we're at. We don't start our meetings with land. It's just two different worlds.
Rav Arora:I assume you share what I was saying earlier which piece of land belonged to who at which time? It's not always one group belonging to one land, it's different groups of eyeing for that.
Aaron Pete:It's complicated Archaeology. We have a David Sheppe who I've interviewed. He's an archaeologist here. He can tell you the facts on which grave sites where Chewathil had our grave site. He can do a pretty good job of laying that out. It's not crazy in question. Obviously there's going to be challenges of exactly what line we're drawing. For the most part at this point we'd just be happy to get some of our land back. We're not asking for 100% back.
Rav Arora:Which groups are vying for that land and therefore lost. One group that may want some part of a land, but that group barbarically killed them or slaughtered them or attacked them and they didn't get that land. That group that lost out on that land. What's happening to them? Some of that history is over 300 years old.
Aaron Pete:Some people just don't have that information, but I would say that that's not a common issue within indigenous communities. It's like, oh, maybe 10,000 years ago, this person at this point, we want that land right over there that would allow us to grow our community in a healthy way. We're not going crazy back 2,000 years ago for what was going on. I mean.
Rav Arora:From what I understand, there are certain areas, though, where it's like two competing tribes were warring for that area. We might give a land acknowledgement for one particular tribe in this area, but there might have been other tribes vying for that in potentially recent history, but they lost out on that. Which is their land and whose land goes where? I don't know.
Aaron Pete:I think that that would be an interesting intellectual conversation that I'm sure communities have. But today we're like we want this piece of land and maybe another community goes we want that piece of land but we would be happy to hash that out, but at this point in time it's like we don't even have access to the land. So that's like pretty much, I think, just premature in the practical sense of actually working towards getting certain spots back. But self-censorship is like that's what your story rings so clear. This is what happens to you when you speak your opinions. There's an actual consequence, and that's so frustrating to me because I don't think that your article was that controversial. Even if you disagree with what you had to say. There's no reason that people should have been unfriending you, hating on you, saying anything like. It's just an opinion, it's a perspective that you're allowed to have as a person on planet Earth. And we've hit this point where so many people reach out to me privately and say I agree with what you said, but I could never say it out loud.
Aaron Pete:And you talked about that exact same thing, and that's such a terrifying position.
Aaron Pete:So many people will say I hate land acknowledgments but I do them because I don't want to get in trouble and it's like, well, that's actually not helping my indigenous community in any way, shape or form and we've created all these kind of rules of what you're supposed to placate to for indigenous communities that my indigenous community doesn't even know you're doing. So I don't like the indigenous communities kind of get blamed for issues like land acknowledgments because it's not something we're asking for. It's not something like if you go to an indigenous community's website, we're not asking for it and to say that is so controversial and it shouldn't be. It should just be a perspective you're allowed to have. So I'm just curious what thoughts you have. Have things gotten worse in terms of being able to share your opinions? Have things gotten better? Do you feel like you're more comfortable to speak your opinions?
Rav Arora:Yeah, oh yeah. I mean, when you kind of come out of the closet as an independent thinker and you've kind of been canceled or hated on or initially excluded by certain friends, so you eventually find your own tribe, you find various groups that like you, and there are daners in that too, right. It's like kind of this reinforcement of ideology, these echo chambers that get created on the left and the right and all the middle space in between that. But at this point I worry literally never about what I want to say, because I've already kind of come out and made the heretical points that I've made and that's rubbed some people the wrong way and they hate me and they don't want to be friends anymore. But there's other people that really like my work now and at this point for me truth is the only thing that matters, and if that means that some people on the right or the left aren't going to like it, then they're not going to like it. I'm still going to pursue the truth, no matter where it leads me. And that you know, with COVID I kind of took some controversial positions, which I don't think should be controversial, and that alienated some people before who supported my work. And that's fine to me. As long as people understand where I'm coming from and are honestly engaging with my work and looking at a diversity of sources, then that to me is a noble pursuit.
Rav Arora:But what ends up happening is many people take a position, take a certain line on a topic, and they just become attached to that, even when weeks or months or years later, that position becomes farcically idiotic to take and is not in line with the data. And we've seen some prominent intellectuals and media figures behave in certain ways that have been quite surprising and unprincipled. But I think that's the only way out is having certain core principles and not being married to our ideas. You know, one thing Joe Rogan says quite a bit on his podcast is like we can't have this egoic attachment to our ideas, because they are just ideas and those ideas often change and the science may change on one topic or another.
Rav Arora:We might find out 10 years from now that something that you and I are both doing right now in our lives is harmful or dangerous, because science evolves and we learn new things and we correct our models accordingly. It's never a static fundamentalist religious doctrine that can't be altered or changed or reinterpreted or, you know, translate a different way. The landscape of views on a number of different topics often is quite wide and we have to find our footing and recognize that different people can reasonably disagree on this specific topic. And it's not a matter of black and white thinking. It's often getting into the complexities and really absorbing some of the data and figuring out what's right, what makes sense, and navigating that complex territory, like the kind that we just navigated, of historical wrong, injustice in the past versus individual behavior, ownership, government policy, culture, psychology. These topics are very, very complicated and they're not easily digestible on a strictly left wing or right wing basis.
Aaron Pete:One of my next questions was, around as a journalist, how you feel about Bill C-11, bill C-16, what's going on. We're seeing more and more journalists being laid off. As an independent journalist, what is your kind of understanding of the landscape and what's going on?
Rav Arora:Yeah, well, we've talked a lot about the social justice ideas and I think it's a, it's another incarnation of the social justice ideology that the government has to come in and promote Canadian content and indigenous creators and minority creators.
Rav Arora:And so Bill C-18, bill C-11, they've come in and said Netflix, we have to follow this mandate to preferentially amplify and boost Canadian content creators. And they've tried doing that with Instagram and Metta. And, as us Canadians we know, if you go on Instagram and you want to look at New York Times or CBC or whoever, you can't access it anymore on IG right, which is just a complete failure and was avoidable and predictable, because those platforms Facebook, metta, as it's called, and Instagram said that they wouldn't be able to accommodate that because they're already providing a service anyways to those companies like the CBC and Global News. And to me it's just so interesting to see this dichotomy of the government wanting to come in and promote journalists here in Canada, because the business model in Canada is failing and less and less people are interested in what news anchor at 9 o'clock has to say on CBC or what. I'm not even sure if I can name a single person that works for Global News. I could probably name a couple for CBC.
Aaron Pete:Mark Quintrigues the weather guy.
Rav Arora:Is that Global News? I apologize, man, I don't know who you are. Maybe I'll meet you one day, but it's like Canadian content is declining and this is less and less popular. The business model is failing and the government in this similar, this kind of a quality of outcomes, compassion, this kind of uplifting these groups has come in and tried to impose these mandates on other companies to promote their own craters. And my question is why can't we just have great Canadian content that's just great that people want to listen to? Why do we need the government to come in and say Netflix, spotify, rumble, instagram, payback, cbc or promote CBC in the Globe and Mail? It's like I want to read the Globe and Mail because I love the Globe and Mail Hypothetically, and there are some good writers there. This idea that the government has to come in to me is just laughable when you're seeing on the other side, like in the US and not even US, because I'm kind of part of this now this movement of writers on Substack who are making millions of dollars, like Barry Weiss. The Free Press just published in there recently on the bill C18 topic Alex Berenson, matt Taibbi, glenn Greenwald left Substack and is on Rumble now and doing fantastic there and many other independent journalists and content creators on Substack.
Rav Arora:Oftentimes it was like one or two people, or three or four people generating like $2 million or $4 million or even $400, $500, $500, it's like, why is their model working so well and why is the CBC's model or the Globe and Mail model not working as well? It's like, instead of the government trying to impose various mandates, those companies and outlets should look at what's best for them and see, or what's conducive to economic and cultural and just political success for their outlets. Why or how can the CBC become more and more relevant and more and more successful in this global, competing marketplace of ideas? How can they become better? How can they become more honest and have a diversity of opinions and platform conservative, libertarian and liberal writers and offer differing viewpoints on different platforms and different formats and cater more and more to Gen Z? That, to me, is a much better conversation and what should be happening, rather than the government trying to play a role in this.
Aaron Pete:What's crazy is to think about like Gadsad, Jordan Peterson, Michaela Peterson, Ariel Hohani, like Tom McDonald, like you think of big names that blow up, I think go straight to the US, because A there's a big mark, knock them out well.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, there's more opportunities and there's less restriction. Gadsad had like a whole piece on how, like the Quebec and Canadian government were taking like 50% of his book sales on his biography of his life and he was like, but this is my life, like how are you taking money on my story for my life? And that was just like such a good like editorial on like where we're at and how crazy things can be. And that was before Bill C11. It seems like we don't want Canadian creators to succeed in some ways by implementing this where it's focused on the CBC instead of the individual creators that are actually gaining voice, gaining traction and gaining recognition.
Rav Arora:Yeah, well, the policy would cover CBC and other Canadian creators, so it is designed to help Canadian creators. But I just think the question we should be asking is why do Canadian creators need help? Like I don't need help. I mean, do you need help from the government to promote your podcast? It's like your podcast should be good because it's good, it should be watched because people want to watch it, not because it's, you know, the government mandated, you know, Spotify to put you up on trending. I mean that would help you, but it's like you know why is that needed?
Rav Arora:It's the same idea to many of these social justice ideologies. Yeah, it's like we have to, you know, prioritize or amplify things from the top down rather than looking at it from the bottom up. And the sad reality is that Canadian media is dying. And I mean, you know sad is one word to use, or you could be happy, depending on where you line up politically, but you know that's the reality. And if Canadian media like CBC and global news will, you know, die into irrelevance in a few years, then let it die, or it can figure out what it can do to promote its content and to care to a diverse range of people across political spectrums and then suddenly more people will trust it, right Like I'll be happy to read global news or CBC if I find it interesting. I mean, currently I don't really find it that interesting. I mean, apart from some news articles, I don't have like a lot of. Like I said, I can't even name a single person on global news. Maybe I should check out your guy that you recommended.
Aaron Pete:He's just a weather guy. He's been there for like 20 years. Maybe he just says the weather. Really well, maybe I should just go there. He's killing it.
Rav Arora:He's taking care of things. But this I feel like we should be having a conversation of how to get the best ideas out there. And if we have a lack of talent here in Canada, if, for whatever reason, we don't have as many big journalists and outlets thriving, then those outlets should look in the mirror. Those journalists should look in the mirror and see how they can be better, rather than Trudeau coming in and mandating Spotify to amplify certain podcasters over others.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, in 2021 of March, you interviewed Jordan Peterson. That had to have been a moment in your life where you were incredibly proud of yourself. He was gaining prominence, making an impact. How was it like to book that interview and to run that?
Rav Arora:Yeah. So that was behind the scenes. It was Michaela Peterson who I'd become good friends with and she invited me on her podcast. And that was before Jordan kind of came back to the forefront. And when he did come back and he was doing his book tour for 12 more rules for life, I reached out to Michaela and said I'd love to interview him in the New York Post and she was like yeah, we're doing a very limited amount of interviews. I think there was an interview at the time by, I think, the Sunday Times that was really quite bad and was disfavorable and didn't, from what I remember, was not fair to Michaela and Jordan, if memory serves. But in any case, I reached out to Michaela and said I'd love to interview him and she's like okay, this is going to be one of two or one of three interviews he would do with a journalist and I felt incredibly honored and privileged to have that opportunity.
Rav Arora:And I remember then getting on the phone with Jordan for the interview over the phone and there was a couple of calls there and I just pitched to him point blank. I was like I feel like this interview we're going to do, let's just record it because I feel like there's a lot of interesting topics to talk about and I have some noteworthy things to bounce off of you and to just get your thoughts on about religion, mysticism, suffering, spirituality, identity, politics, inequality, social justice, cancel, culture, et cetera. And I just kind of just shot my shot and he was like, okay, sure, we can take a look at that, we can do that. And then his producer he seemed interested, eric Foster at the time. He's a great guy, great friend of mine, he's a great podcast producer, has his own company and is doing amazing work. And so here we were, we set up the date, whatever it was, maybe a February or March of 2020 or maybe 2021, I think it was. Well, I think the interview came out only last year, if I'm mistaken. I can't remember it came out last year, the year before, but it was. The interview was done and it got released like a year and a half later, from where, yeah, they have a massive queue like all these interesting guests that Jordan interviews.
Rav Arora:And I'm honestly, I remember like just the days before I'm like, oh crap, I'm interviewing Jordan Peterson, oh shit, oh my God, jordan, like this guy was just incredible, heroic, uplifting influence in my life who I've looked up to so much and who I just love and just learned so much from. Every time I listen to Jordan, it's like okay, rewind the last five minutes and put it like okay, you're saying that. Okay, all right. It takes time to really understand what he says, because he thinks on a really multi-dimensional, 5d level, where it's like he's painting this incredible portrait of just this collage of diverse interesting, complex and just sometimes tangentially related ideas across religion, philosophy, mysticism, psychedelics, political science, et cetera, and it's just a pleasure to see his mind work in real time and to see how he thinks about these things on a very deep, intuitive level. And so find myself looking at him like, oh hey, jordan, what's up? And it was just like it was such a crazy moment for me because I'm like this guy I look up to so much.
Rav Arora:We're about to have a conversation and I was fairly nervous before and I was like, oh my God, like am I going to do a good job with this or am I going to suck, or what if he doesn't like me? And it just ended up. We ended up flowing in this really smooth and seamless manner and getting into this flow of conversation that I found really productive and nutritious. And we went into all these deep areas and I mean he said so many things in that conversation that really stuck out to me and really stayed with me for a while and on one level it was just great to hear him get a bit of reassurance for where I was at, because he at one point said, like why am I talking to you? It's like we were talking about identity politics and racial privilege and disadvantage. And he was like why am I talking to you right now? It's like not because you're this brown Sikh guy that I want to get diversity points from or because I just have to do this, but because you're an interesting young guy. I think he said you're an interesting, bright character and I want to hear what you have to say. And I was like, oh shit, all right, all right, I'll take that, I'll take that, I'll put that up on my wall and just remember that as a great quote. Take it to my grave.
Rav Arora:But we got into this flow and I mean he again, the way he thinks it's like wow, he's really able to weave across different domains of philosophy and science and religion and economics in a way that I think is unique to him and very difficult to do, to this kind of juggling act of putting all these ideas together and creating this incredible collage of lobsters and Narnia and Harry Potter and psychology and Jesus and fucking DMT. It's like what? What did you just say, man? It's truly an art. And so when we were talking one thing he said in particular when I asked him about religion and the decline of religious interest and religious affiliations among Gen Z and this kind of itch, this thirst for spirituality and for connection with divinity and the importance of that in our lives. I asked him about it and about why he thinks it's necessary and important to living a good, meaningful life, and he responded in this totally unconventional, unorthodox way he's like Rav.
Rav Arora:Why do people go to a rave? He's like there's music, there's dance, there might be substances involved, there might be MDMA, or even if there's not, you're at a rave, there's loud music. You're kind of collectively, in this community of people that are dedicated, that are kind of unlike a kind of religious ceremony, I mean, even on a basic level of rave you're just there to have a good time together with people and you're kind of synchronized to the rhythm of the music and you're experiencing this collective ecstasy Again, with actual ecstasy or not, it doesn't matter, but you're having this powerful experience that is spiritual at its foundational level. I mean, you see all the fanfare around the Taylor Swift era's tour, what she's doing is a form of religiosity in the sense that it taps into something so deeply wired in our DNA for connecting with others and for coming together and for singing these anthems.
Rav Arora:In Taylor Swift's case, I thought her last album, midnight's, was absolutely fantastic and I think her best album out of all albums that she's created. And I was just stunned by all these songs about heartbreak and human emotion and about self identity and interacting with other people. It's like those ideas and those experiences, good or bad, in her songs. People are coming to the era's tour prepared and in this sort of collective ecstasy and joy and fervor and kind of enjoying these songs and taking it in as a group not just as an individual but as a group and enjoying the kind of mystique around what she brings to the table and what energy she symbolizes in that particular experience.
Rav Arora:It's like that's fundamentally spiritual, even if there's not an exact dogma attached to it.
Rav Arora:It's like there's something there of like the way my little sister looks at Taylor Swift is like I mean, for better or worse or for you want to say that there might be some downsides that I don't know, but there's something there that I think is so deeply rooted in the way we communicate and the way we interface with reality that we need to figure out more and more ways to have experiences like that, that are surrounded, that revolve around good, ethical, uplifting and communal ideas that we find in Christianity, that we find in a church service or at a Buddhist temple.
Rav Arora:We need to figure out more and more ways to come together across religious and political boundaries and acknowledge our common humanity and connect on this deeply intrinsic, indivisible, unified level of us as a collective consciousness that is all in it, together, to use a tired cliche that is trying to figure out what to do and how to make sense of reality in this limited time of whatever 60, 70, 80, 90 years at best. For the healthiest of us, I think, figuring out more and more ways to have those places where we can come together and experience self-transcendence and then come back to our reality refreshed, reinvigorated and galvanized to live our life. I think that is what adds color to our life, that a lot of people are missing in this atheistic and overly scientifically reductionist life, where we are missing the ego-shattering, self-transcending surrender to something bigger than us.
Aaron Pete:I love that. I definitely agree with you and just mentioned the name of the podcast the bigger than me kind of.
Rav Arora:There, you go Also.
Aaron Pete:you've delved into so many really interesting topics, but the next one is also controversial COVID-19, the vaccines, your conversation with Mark Cuban, another person many people have heard of. Well, what is that experience like? How do you process, what sort of took place and how do you feel about it now?
Rav Arora:Yeah, so to be clear, mark and I didn't actually have a conversation, it was just on Twitter.
Aaron Pete:No, that's sorry, yeah, yeah.
Rav Arora:Yeah, back and forth and there's some behind the scenes information there that I got to be careful what to say, not to say, but it's kind of a long story. But got a bit of a tap on the shoulder by the Joe Rogan a couple of years ago when he was being attacked widely for at that specific point talking about the connection between COVID vaccines and myocarditis, heart inflammation in young males, and all he did was talk about it and acknowledged that it's a real issue and should not be downplayed and it should absolutely factor into our calculus for who should be recommended to get the vaccines and whether it's a wise and beneficial public health policy at all for young healthy people in particular. And he was getting widely attacked. One individual in particular was Mark Cuban. Joe just asked me kind of behind the scenes to kind of play a role in engaging with Mark, who I then did engage with behind the scenes over email and we had long form exchanges on this topic and he just revealed his idiocy and his nut-baggery just across these emails, like he was just not willing to acknowledge that the COVID vaccines happened to be the most dangerous pharmaceutical intervention promoted across society likely in history. I mean it's hard to paint big brushes like that, but this is really the first big experimental pharmaceutical intervention that's been promoted to everyone across society.
Rav Arora:And unfortunately, as much as I don't want this to be the case at all, and suddenly I'm suddenly spending hours and hours reading epidemiology and cardiology studies on vaccines is a topic that I never, ever would have thought I would have written about or taken any interest in. I mean never interested in vaccines or epidemiology, like just not my area. I don't care for that topic intrinsically. But here I was in this phase of like these vaccines were being pushed on the public without sufficient knowledge and information around safety and efficacy and a lot of those narratives kind of changed over time and there was public health admissions of OK, it doesn't stop transmission, even though we said it was and we forced you and we mandated you to get it. But there just hasn't been a clear reconciliation and concession of how dangerous these vaccines truly were on a population level, in terms of the race of adverse events that we saw was 1 in 800. 1 in 800 people who got the COVID vaccine experienced a serious adverse event rate a serious adverse event such as myocarditis or menstrual irregularities or blood clotting or lung issues or autoimmune issues, et cetera. And that 1 in 800 by the comes from a top of the tier study in the journal Vaccine by Dr Joseph Freeman, who I've interviewed on my podcast, and he looked at this, went straight into the Pfizer and Moderna trials and counted the serious adverse events and came up with 1 in 800, which is just completely just stunning and damning for public health that that level of adverse event rates existed, given that all of their vaccines that we know prior have adverse event rates of one in a million right now on the market. So go and get your flu shot, go and get your measles vaccine 1 in a million roughly, but these vaccines the adverse event rate was 1 in 800.
Rav Arora:So, going back to my Mark Cuban debate, we were going back and forth and he was just unwilling to acknowledge any of the points I was making, and this was in January of 2022. And fast forward to this summer, in August, joe was talking to a PPD, patrick, by David, and it was just so crazy to see like something that happened in that long ago suddenly led to something now where Joe was talking to Patrick and Patrick asked him about Mark Cuban's been criticizing you and attacking you and what do you think about him? And Joe then mentioned my exchange with him and about how he thought I was right and what I was saying was compelling and what Mark was saying was wrong, and I posted that clip on Twitter and Mark saw it and he just went on this I want to be fair to him. I mean he definitely got triggered but then started asking some really hard hitting questions, some of which were just idiotic and ignorant and kind of detracting from the issue. But at the same time, you know, he just really wanted to engage on this topic and so he asked a number of questions to me and we just exchanged long, like essay responses on Twitter and people can go check it out on my sub stack of the illusion of consensus, where I serialized our responses back and forth, because we I think we, you know, I responded to him like five or six times and he asked me, you know, four or five big questions that I responded to and then Joe, you know, retweeted some of my stuff and it kind of became this big thing. But, in a nutshell, that exchange just revealed to me how ideological someone like Mark is like in this very ideologically insulated, billionaire, wealthy Democrat.
Rav Arora:New York Times Atlantic reading coalition of people that you know are getting a certain narrative about what's going on, about free speech and censorship, and you know think Joe Rogan is you know the devil and Elon Musk is just a horrible person and mRNA vaccines were beneficial for everyone and cancel culture isn't a real thing and you know Jordan Pearson is a fraud. Like there's all these kinds of ideas that people have. We you talk to people of a certain ideological echo chamber and that's fully what they think. Like they hate Joe Rogan, they hate JP with a fierce passion and they think vaccines were just beneficial for everyone. Because the scientists said that at the time and you know it's in front of everyone's eyes, people can go back and read it.
Rav Arora:But Mark was just unwilling to recognize what I was saying in that specific context, which is that on net, the best available evidence shows that for young, healthy people, particularly young men, the vaccines were net negative, not in that everyone was dropping dead or that there was everyone's getting heart attacks from vaccines, but that on net, if you look at the benefits and the advantages to mass vaccinating say, young and healthy people between the ages of 20 and 25, and you compare that to the side effects, including myocarditis and menstrual irregularities in young women. It appears to be the case that the negative is far outweighed the positives, and that's been my conclusion journalistically. But Mark was just unwilling to recognize any of that, and so it was just sad to see him just maintain his ideology at all costs and not actually look at the evidence and data that I was providing.
Aaron Pete:What was it like to go in on a topic that you're not an expert on that Like? Of course, journalists are not like experts. You know one thing they learn about lots of different things. But what was it like to start to get interested in that? You said it wasn't something that you ever imagined you would do. What was it like to have to approach this in comparison to, perhaps, the identity politics which it sounds like caught your eye initially?
Rav Arora:Yeah, yeah. Well, this one was just writing what man COVID vaccine was done in the aftermath of the federal and provincial vaccine mandates, where suddenly I couldn't go to a gym and exercise unless I had the COVID vaccine. And, thankfully, murph's gym shout out to Kyle Murphy. He actually kept things open and defied the public health orders, which is one of the most courageous, audacious and noble things that one can do is in the face of I mean, tyranny is not a hyperbolic word, in my view, when we look at what really happened and actually defying these tyrannical, sensorious, authoritarian measures that were imposed on the public was the right thing to do. It was right and ethical to resist some of this nonsense. And that's initially what got me going was like, okay, I'm being mandated to get this thing. That at that time they said it stopped transmission and the whole idea. I remember back on Twitter it was like, okay, when I was debating people and I was like I don't know if I want to get this and I condemn mandates, and they were like, well, what about my grandma? I'm a rab. What about my grandpa? What about your grandparents? Did you take it for them? And there was problems with the logic at that point too. But obviously, moving forward that logic just became antiquated and that was no longer. There was no community benefit to vaccination in the long term. It just stopped transmission for a couple months.
Rav Arora:But at that point I refused to take an experimental vaccine because my government thought that that was in my best interest and I did not see the relevant data. If I saw the data that it was, oh, my rate of dying would go down by 100x. And there was no myocarditis. There was no serious adverse events associated with this vaccine, or they were very, very rare. They were one in a million, 100%, like give me the shots right now If I saw that. But that's not what I saw. And those concerns that I had at the time were vindicated in the long term as more and more data on myocarditis has come out.
Rav Arora:Brett Weinstein and I just did a great podcast and we were talking about some of the recent data studies from South Korea and Hong Kong showing that individuals who got myocarditis in the vaccine at the one year follow up, 50% of them still had evidence of scarring in their heart. And if you talk to the CDC and the FDA and Mark Cuban, they have no answer for that. They just blindly ideologically promoted the solution that, to be charitable, they thought was the right thing to do because the CDC and the FDA said so. But the problem is and this is the title of my sub-stack the illusion of consensus is that the experts that were promoting these vaccines were of a very specific kind, and there were other experts that were sidelined, marginalized and censored, such as my colleague, dr J Baracharia. We run the illusion of consensus together and he's not some anti-vaccine quack, he's not some right-wing asshole. He's a tenured Stanford professor of epidemiology with a stellar background. He's authored many, many great scientific studies. He, early on, was doing the studies in Santa Clara County on finding the true infection fatality rate of COVID, rather than what was being percent at the time, which is like 1%, 2% or 3% infection fatality rate, and his studies looking at a broad sample of infections found a rate more along the lines of 0.2%. But 0.2% of people were dying of COVID with a very sharp age gradient, over 65 and plus, and comorbidities were heavily impacted, but people of younger ages and healthier backgrounds were not as affected, and so that to me was just incredibly educational.
Rav Arora:Was looking at this topic? Ok, what's right and wrong? What are the experts saying, ok, fda and CDC is saying this, and some experts cited in the New York Times and the CBC and Canadian public health agencies are saying X, but hold on, dr Jay Bhattacharya, dr Martin Koldorf of Harvard, dr Vinay Prasad I mean we can go on and on about all these dissident doctors who oppose these mandates and had differing perspectives and felt that their voices were being stifled and, in many cases, actually censored. Like Dr Jay Bhattacharya, he was blacklisted on Twitter because he was against lockdowns and mask mandates and vaccine mandates, and he suffered the consequence of that and school closures as well. And so for me I'm looking at this with an open mind what I felt like was happening was that certain experts were being preferentially selected in mainstream media circles and other ones, like Dr Jay, dr Martin Tracy, beth Hoag, et cetera, were not being respected and acknowledged.
Rav Arora:And so you had this illusion of consensus, that kind of perpetuated in the pandemic, where people just said, well, oh, the experts say masks work. Oh, the experts say vaccines are good for everyone. Oh, the experts say lockdowns are effective and good for us, when in reality, experts disagreed on those points and what really mattered was the evidence, and some experts got the evidence and the core facts more right than others, and in my mind, the experts chosen by CNN and CDC and FDA were wrong about many of those core points. And other experts also from institutions like Stanford and Harvard, got things right and we should trust those experts more than the ones that got it wrong. But instead there's been this whole charade of doubling down and saying, well, those experts were right at the time and I was right at the time and I'm still right, and anyway there's all these internal politics that have just become so inflammatory where people just don't want to admit that they were wrong, and it's been quite tragic to see people lose their credibility on that front.
Aaron Pete:That's probably one of the scariest things about the whole circumstances that we're not grading people right now based on the answers they gave what was their position to school lockdowns? Did school lockdowns work? Like actually just judging people based on like a resume? Did you get things right throughout the pandemic, did you call things out correctly or did you get a bunch of things wrong? And we're still calling you the person to look to for the next pandemic, like, if anything, we need to get some of these things straight because we know another pandemic is going to happen Not today, not tomorrow, maybe not next year, maybe not in the next five years, but inevitably these things arise. Hopefully they're all manmade, like the last one, but inevitably these issues are going to arise again and we need a trusted scientific mechanism because right now I don't think people trust the next vaccine they come out with.
Aaron Pete:I just saw on Global News this morning. They were like only 37% of British Columbians are getting like the fourth booster and it's like okay, that's clear that people have lost faith or said this is no longer worth it or I'm no longer interested. So we can't have like a dissuaded population that's not confident moving forward in the institutions that we rely on, and I very much like Eric Weinstein's argument on, like we need to find trust in our institutions again, but trust based on evidence, and that's not something that many people have right now, and so we're in this very weird time. I'm wondering what you felt like during this period. Was your responsibilities as a journalist? Discussing a topic Like, of course, immediately people are going to go. Well, you're not a scientist, rav. Like you don't know what's going on. How did you process that and what principles did you bring when you were posting on Substack? People trust your voice. How did you process making sure that you are principled in your approach?
Rav Arora:Well, I was always evidence based, citing studies, not citing quack scientists or just bloggers coming up with statistics. I was always referring to real evidence and what I thought was the best evidence and, to be honest, like still playing the expert game to a degree, because this whole thing of well, you should trust the experts and, oh well, some people don't care about experts and, yes, there are some conspiratorial people on the right and the left that don't want to trust any experts, that won't get any other vaccine and will never, ever trust any medical intervention and think that the government's trying to implant us with 5G and all this stuff. Right, there are those people out there, but for me it was looking at the best experts. Which experts got these things right? Which experts seemed the most reasonable and were able to change their opinion or take the red pill and take the controversial position, even if it damaged their careers to some degree? Who are those experts that have a clean record over COVID or just are striving to be as accurate as possible and to talk about real issues like vaccine side effects and the harms of lockdowns and school closures, and not just deferentially, just trusting those experts as just purveyors of the gospel, but talking to them and learning about their ideas and being educated and, again, using scientific sources.
Rav Arora:All my work was predicated on studies and reports and analyses done by leading scholars on the dangers of the vaccine, because if my work was not based on that then it should be discarded and it should be bullshit. No one should trust it. But I was always sourcing from scientific journals and peer reviewed studies. That doesn't mean it's automatically right, because everyone uses their own. You can find studies to approve anything Right. You can find peer reviewed analyses that approve your perspective and not others, and people can get stuck in these echo chambers. But for me it was really about having an honest conversation about the data and, to some degree, still perplexed why some people just lost their sanity and people that I thought were very, very reasonable and still are very reasonable on certain topics, who just failed to be critical and skeptical enough in the face of an emergency.
Rav Arora:And it seems to be that fear and death and tragedy seem to be the cause for why that happened. Like why some people who are very reasonable who just got so afraid of COVID and arguably to some degree that's reasonable, although to some degree it's also not when you're worried about vaccinating your 11 and 15 year olds like they're infinitesimally low risk. You're driving on the highway every day with your kids and not worrying about it, and yet you want to just right away push. I mean, there was some very credible public intellectuals who were like I raced to go at the pharmacy to get my 15 year old and my 22 year old vaccinated as soon as possible, and the only explanation for that is fear.
Rav Arora:Sufficient fear will motivate people to rush and make irrational decisions, and I think that's what we saw is people lose their rationality in the face of real death and real calamity, like people were dying of COVID. In some cases, icus were filled up, but almost always and I failed to understand why some people did not really see this those people were primarily over the age of 65 or severely obese and diabetic and had lung disease and had all these problems. They were not people like me or people like yourself. Presumably, if you're not dying tomorrow, I don't plan to.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, thankfully you're not.
Rav Arora:The people in hospitals dying of COVID were not my mom, 45 year old, healthy women or your pregnant. The way the vaccines were pushed on pregnant women and breastfeeding women when there was no evidence of safety in those particular people, to be honest, is quite unforgivable in what happened. But people saw death, people experienced fear, people had this mortality shock of like oh God, people are dying, I might die. But they failed to do the reasonable calculus and say, OK, who's dying of COVID, who's in the ICUs? How effective is the vaccine? What do we know and what do we not know? That calculation was not made sufficiently enough and so you had people plunge into unreason.
Aaron Pete:in my opinion, and the other tragedy and this has been talked at ad diagnosium by Joe Rogan is that we didn't push health on people. We didn't push exercise, fitness, going to the gym, taking vitamin D, taking vitamin C, living a healthy life, taking your vitamins. We didn't push any of those things. The only other piece on this topic is just how do you, or how do you hold yourself accountable for mistakes you might make in writing? Looking back on a topic, maybe I would have written this differently, maybe I wouldn't have included that. Who holds you accountable?
Rav Arora:Well, I've had the privilege of collaborating with Dr J Barcharia, who's served as kind of a fact checker, on a couple of pieces at least, but at least endorsing many of the pieces that I've published. And so when I'm writing these things, like recently, I interviewed Dr Anish Koka, cardiologist in Philadelphia. Great guy, super pro vaccine, got three vaccines. One of his daughters was immunocompromised so he was alarmed by COVID early on, took it very, very seriously. But in my interview with him he says I regret vaccinating young, healthy people.
Rav Arora:When I was not sure about safety and efficacy I just blindly followed the FDA and the CDC and I was wrong to do that. And I wasn't wrong for elderly people, where it seems to be more clear that there's some benefit there, but I was wrong to vaccinate young, healthy people at my clinic. That to me is just immensely. It's incredible to see that level of humility. And I'm not wrong and they're going to now do better in the future.
Rav Arora:And I've again I've played this expert game.
Rav Arora:I've never been this sort of guy who's just blogging and doing his own statistical manipulation and figuring out his own stats, like I've always talked to Dr J Byarcharya and Dr Anish Koka different cardiologists and epidemiologists, and outsourced to them and to the degree that any might of them might turn out to be wrong on some things, I will hold them accountable if that turns out to be true and if there's something that I got wrong that someone wants to alert me to and there have been, there hasn't been a ton of pushback.
Rav Arora:I mean there've been some people who've been critical. Sam Harris and I have had a long form back and forth over email for several months. We've gone back and forth and really vigorously debated, in good faith and with love and respect and compassion, on these very controversial topics, and that's probably the so Mark Cuban, sam Harris, I mean those are probably the cases where I've really had my ideas tested and in my opinion, from my biased perspective, I've been right on those topics and those guys have been fatally wrong on those on those topics and I've failed to correct their views.
Aaron Pete:In my opinion, Is there anything that Sam Harris specifically said that maybe moved your opinion at all?
Rav Arora:Yes, yeah, yeah. There is one thing not to say. It's not that he, not that I changed my mind because of him, but definitely an emphasis that he helped put for me was like, okay, you know, for me, yes, public health authorities failed and they pushed and dangerous and ineffective vaccines on the population without having reliable safety data, and that should be widely condemned and we should not trust Pfizer, moderna and the CDC that the way that we did, and we should be honest about risks and benefits for these pharmaceutical procedures or interventions, rather. But at the same time, there is this growing anti-vax cult that doesn't want to believe anything ever from public health authorities and engages in just wildly hyperbolic rhetoric about the vaccines being a genocidal effort to kill people. I know people who think that the apocalypse is coming and that the genocide was committed and, while it's slowly going to be, more and more people are going to be dying off because of the vaccine and it's not impossible, by the way, but it's the rhetoric that's used, like Pfizer, moderna like wanted to kill people and the CDC and the FDA wanted to harm people. It's like there's some people that have just gone too far out in conspiracy territory and Sam is right to be worried about this epidemic of misinformation out there where people aren't trusting elections. They aren't trusting any, any vaccine period.
Rav Arora:But the solution to that is not saying those people are wrong, you know, just hammering down on these people and saying they're wrong about everything and that they're conspiracy theorists. It's to say, oh hey, we got this wrong. We got these variables crucially wrong. We were wrong to push mask mandates and lockdowns and vaccine mandates on the population. We apologize for every young male and every young female who experienced a vaccine side effect when there was no clear benefit to them. We apologize for lockdowns destroying our economy. That's the way out is humility and conceding where we got wrong.
Rav Arora:And then you're in a better position to critique the conspiracy theorists. But if you yourself aren't admitting that you got things fatally wrong, you are in no position to critique those people on the other side that have plunged into unreason because you're just or on the same continuum of just lunacy as they are. You've gotten core facts wrong and you won't admit you're wrong and you want to complain about misinformation when your podcast Sam Erskine's podcast propagated so much misinformation during the pandemic and he's focused on misinformation on the other side. It's like okay, man.
Rav Arora:Well, first look in the mirror and see what you got wrong and then you'll be in a better position to critique others. But currently you need to look in the mirror and see the experts and the scientists that you platformed that got things completely wrong and, if failed, to correct their views on the manner. There should be a true reconciliation on that front and I'm interested in engaging with Sam in public and having a conversation with him and actually really pushing him on some of these points in a way that I don't think Alex Schreidman or Chris Williamson or Russell Brand were able to do in their interviews with him, where they kind of mildly pushed back or kind of pushed back, but the conversation was just too sprawling to actually drill down on some of the core disagreements.
Aaron Pete:How do you avoid you've talked about it a few times echo chambers, because people, you get influenced by individuals. Joe Rogan's retweeting you. It's all of a sudden like oh my gosh, like I'm getting retweeted by the goat, like I'm that can be so encouraging. How do you make sure that your positions are solid and not founded on the community you found, on sub-stack or the influences of other individuals? That it's. It's based on the facts.
Rav Arora:Yeah Well, I'm. I'm always just so skeptical of everything. I'm skeptical of religion, I'm skeptical of science, I'm skeptical of of claims Christians make and atheists make and you know epidemiologists make and people across society. My default is I don't know the answers and I'm not willing to just blindly trust you on faith or because you have a degree from Harvard. You know in in, you know sociology or epidemiology. I want to carefully analyze these ideas and see where you're coming from and look at the data for myself and compare that to other perspectives and then, you know, come to my own view and understanding of these complex topics rather than just trusting. You know one side or the other, and you know everyone is vulnerable to audience capture and getting things wrong and kind of forming their own ideological echo chamber. But I'm, you know, one thing that I can guarantee to my readers is that I'm always going to stick to certain foundational principles and be skeptical and willing to push consensus on a wide range of topics, like currently.
Rav Arora:Right now I'm working on a piece about how France, germany and other countries are wrongly criminalizing pro-Palestinian protests because of their connection to Hamas and terrorist activity. If you value free speech, it shouldn't be just for COVID protests. It shouldn't just be for the freedom convoy, it should also be for people on the pro-Palestinian side, even if you totally disagree with them, even if you don't think they're rightly and sufficiently condemning Hamas, which they should. I can disagree with. You know, like you know, blm Chicago, you know, put out their poster saying that they're pro-Palestine and there's literally an illustration of a guy on a you know paraglider, you know Hamas terrorist that came down on paragliders and conducted this atrocious massacre. Right, and it's like BLM Chicago, you are completely wrong on this point and just horrifically wrong and you are embarrassing yourself. You should apologize. And then one of the chapters did kind of deliver this semi-apology, which I don't think was sufficient.
Rav Arora:But there have been protests across university campuses and across Canada that are very pro-Palestine, that I don't think are sufficiently anti-Hamas and anti you know what atrocity that was just committed. And I think those people you know their ideas, should be condemned and we should disagree with them where necessary, but they should still protest, they should still be, they should still have the right to protest in favor of their views and France and Germany are absolutely wrong to criminalize these protests. And for the mayor of Toronto, she came out and said you know, these protesters don't have their permits and it might be suggesting that it might be illegal. She's wrong to do that, even if I agree with the mayor of Toronto that those protests and I, you know, haven't looked super carefully, but at least some of the protests in Canada have contained distasteful ideas and have not sufficiently and adequately condemned Hamas, in my view, and we should have a rational conversation about immigration.
Rav Arora:And can we just let in endless numbers of people from the Islamic world and other areas of the world that have radically differing views on women's rights and gay rights and how we should conduct society?
Rav Arora:Is it right to just let in those people just, you know, endlessly? You know open our doors wide open, without reconciliation of ideas and without vetting? You know liberal ideas that we value here in the West so much, such as, you know, gay people should not be thrown off buildings, that women should not have to be forced into compliance and have to wear, you know, facial garments like these. Values are important, free speech and freedom of religion are important, and we should talk about issues of people coming in that don't share those values. That's totally on the table, but what's not on the table is banning those people from protesting because they're wrong.
Rav Arora:And then that's something that I know is going to challenge some of my readers, and I've seen people like Dave Rubin, who I've been on the show many times and I really like the guy. He came out in a tweet and said, basically supporting France and Germany, outlawing these protests, and I think he said the West might have a chance and clearly he was supporting that and I think he was wrong about that. So I'm willing to challenge people on sort of my side or in my sort of chambers of influence if I disagree with him on principle, which you know. On this point, protests should be allowed and we should extend free speech to people that we disagree with and that, in some conservative circle, seems to have been a bit lost recently with the Israeli Palestinian conflict, I think.
Aaron Pete:The big issue is likely, like the people we're pushing against is because the fight is like the argument is that it's terrorism and so they're protesting and they're standing with people they view as terrorists, and you're not allowed to encourage terrorism Like acts of violence is not something you have a right to free speech for.
Rav Arora:Right, yeah, well, but that's not everyone, though. Just saying the way France and Germany have just outlawed all pro-Palestinian protests and the way people don't want these protests to happen. There are, you can totally disagree with them, but there are people that are totally against what Hamas did but think that you know the Israeli response is excessive and wrong and you know what Israel is doing dropping bombs into Gaza and there's horrific images coming out of Gaza for what's happening and that the response from Israel is excessive and extremist. There are people who think that, that you think that the Israeli blockade and that you know what, what, how the government in Israel is operating and how they're responding to this crisis is totally wrong and that there is injustice in Gaza. Those views are totally on the table and and I'm afraid and worried that some people on the right want you know, in their casting of all pro-Palestinian protests and being outlawed and wrong, and and and and shouldn't happen You're including people that have views that are absolutely on the table and should be debated and talked about and not outlawed.
Aaron Pete:Right, that makes sense and it overlaps with your understanding of the vaccines, which is that we should be able to have these conversations. My, my next question is around interviews with Brett Weinstein, trigonometry. Things are going well, so I'm just curious as to where you're heading and what you hope to see.
Rav Arora:Yeah, I'm. I'm just continuing my work on sub-stack primarily the illusion of consensus doing podcasts and articles there. A lot of articles, I think, are going to be in the free speech free speech, anti-censorship vein and writing to some degree still about public health and the reckless push for what I view as dangerous and ineffective pharmaceutical interventions for primarily young, healthy people, but also more and more in that same vein, talking about the way our society wants to numb, medicate and just pharmaceutical, put a band-aid on complex issues like depression, adhd, anxiety, the more and more just like COVID, the mainstream solution to those problems, the kind of institutionalized, psychiatric, pharmaceutical response to those problems I think is quite dangerous and flawed and completely wrong. Like the way so many of my friends are medicated you know, have, you know, are taking antidepressants, anxiety medications, ADHD medications is the new thing. Like so many people are on Adderall and Ritalin and are just being pushed by their psychiatrist to take these medications because, you know, they're having a hard time focusing their. They're having a hard time focusing in their lives. And well, why is that? Well, why are they not? Why are they unable to focus? Is it because they don't like their job? They feel like their energies are being, you know, mismatched with the occupation that they're choosing and that they need to reorient their life. They need to look at their anxiety and change the way that they interface with themselves and with other people and look at their childhood trauma and, you know, understand where they came from and why they're here and why, you know, reality is not what they wanted to be and they're, you know, struggling to pay attention. That's a common problem with ADHD and I greatly suffer from that is, I have a really hard time focusing and paying attention, unless I'm talking to Aaron Pete on the podcast here that's my free advertisement for you. But it's like when you have ADHD, it's very, very hard to focus on things that are just ordinary tasks and things that are mundane or monotonous, but it's like well, why do I have that? Well, when I was a kid, I learned to tune out of reality consistently because reality was quite harsh and difficult.
Rav Arora:Growing up as a kid and this is Dr Gabor Mate's work on this topic is how we learn these behavioral patterns. We learn these things from our environment, are traumas in force and inform who we are today, and this idea of someone like me who really struggles with anxiety and ADHD and, to a lesser degree, and depression and psychosomatic chronic pain. It's like go to my psychiatrist or go to my doctor or kind of a mainstream professional and they'll put me on ADHD meds, they'll put me on anti depressants and they might recommend CBT cognitive behavioral therapy which can be effective, but that's not actually going to address deep rooted traumas that I've experienced, that have informed my sort of maladaptive behaviors that have created this kind of what we call ADHD or anxiety. And so I need to look at that and thankfully, you know, there's a great clinic in Vancouver, thrive downtown, where I'm doing this work Deep dives into my childhood, into my behavior, into my influences, with my counselor, occasionally involving psychedelics, which I think can be very, very healing and illuminating.
Rav Arora:But this is going to be my focus, I think, more and more, is the way our society and the way our institutions work in preventing us from actually living healthy, happy, joyful and well connected lives. More and more I'm realizing that the same problem with COVID, you know, not addressing obesity, the obesity epidemic and the diabetes epidemic and sedentary lifestyle and people not eating wholesome, clean foods they just put mRNA vaccines for everyone. But actually the problem is much, much deeper than that. So I'm going to be doing more and more investigations into big pharma and public health and corruption within our medical system, as well as continuing to hammer on the free speech and anti censorship topic.
Aaron Pete:I think you're a huge inspiration for people who want to find their own voice. I think that's becoming more and more important, with organizations like the CBC suffering and looking for more money to continue to share the same type of information. I think voices like yours, at least being able to be independent and share it and through mediums like substacks, allow an opportunity to make money and make a living off of sharing your voice, which I think is so valuable. I'm just wondering what advice you have for individuals who are interested in pursuing a similar path, who are interested in some of the topics you've talked about, or maybe interested in something else, and they're looking to start to share their voice. What advice do you have?
Rav Arora:I would say read a lot, listen to a lot of podcasts, you know, get a wide range of perspectives. Excuse me, go on this. I encourage people to kind of take their life as an adventure towards truth and to find out what's really going on in reality if we can ever gain an objective perception of reality or whatever your opinion on that is. But we should be striving towards better understanding ourselves and each other and looking across religious, political and scientific backgrounds and really trying to find out what's true and what's real and what's beneficial and what's dangerous and harmful on the other side. And I encourage people to be bold and audacious and activate their inner honey badger. As Gad Sad says, be unafraid of the social justice mob. Because that's something that cost me a lot in the short term and was quite painful, as we've talked about, but in the long term it's been liberating to the point where I'm not afraid of saying anything. If I come to some perspective on something that I think is controversial, I'm going to say it. I'm not afraid to kind of come out anymore and have these views, and I think people should challenge orthodoxy where they can and whether that's conservative or progressive, and I think people should be open-minded and acknowledge that, whatever view they have. I mean a lot of what we talked about earlier about racial injustice and changing behavior and government policy. A lot of what I said goes against what my default views were five, six years ago. I differing views, but I read different economists, different thinkers, different intellectuals on the topic and have molded my perspective accordingly, and if I come across a new piece of data that points me in a different direction, I'm willing to go there, and so I encourage people to be open-minded and to look at different sources, read a lot of different information and, when it comes to the pragmatics of doing what I'm doing, really be bold and put yourself out there and not be afraid to reach out. I mean, that's one thing that I did and I was thinking about this the other day when someone on a podcast I was listening to they were also asked about what advice they would give and I was thinking about what's worked for me.
Rav Arora:It's been like sending the emails to Sam Harrison and Jordan Peterson and reaching out to Joe with my articles, joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin and Brett Wines, like really putting in the effort to reach out and to show my work and obviously the prerequisite to that is to having done good work and having put out these big pieces and done the research. But at a certain point you really want to be unafraid to put yourself out there and to show your art, show your creativity, show what you've done to the world and just find a community and build more and more connections. I mean, that's really what I've been doing building more and more connections and reaching out to people. And suddenly it's you know small editors and bigger editors and sell you the New York Post and the Globe and Mail, you know places I've written for. And then you have your own platform and you reach out to McKayla.
Rav Arora:Mckayla Peterson wants to have you on your podcast. And then it's Jordan Peterson and Jordan knows who you are. And then from Jordan you're Brett and Joe. It's like building from the ground up, building that confidence and being courageous and bold in reaching out to people and showing them what you're worth and what you're capable of.
Aaron Pete:That's so fantastic. How can people follow along with your journey?
Rav Arora:Twitter Ravrora1 and Instagram is Ravrora, but I do have a private account, which I'm contemplating at what point I want to just unleash the monster and go public, but I'm worried it'll be bad for my mental health because Twitter is already just crazy enough with just so many DMs and connections and all these debates happening, and I kind of try to keep Instagram as private and insulated as I can. But generally, you know people in Chilwack or people that I know of or people that know me. They can, if they want to reach out to me, they can DM me on Instagram or Twitter and, yeah, that's primarily where I'm at and in terms of my work. They can subscribe to my sub-stack, the Illusion of Consensus, and follow my podcast and my articles there.
Aaron Pete:I really enjoy doing this. This was a fantastic conversation. I think show is the importance of having nuanced conversation. I appreciate you being willing to take the time and have this conversation.
Rav Arora:Yeah, of course, and I'm glad we finally did this, and I apologize for keeping you waiting for a year, but I'm glad we did wait and it was in the right headspace to have a conversation like this, and I look forward to checking back in maybe a year or two later and see where things changed. So you were worth the wait. Yeah, thanks, ben.