At 26 and with 3.75 million subscribers of his YouTube channel, Dhruv Rathee is an important voice in the world of chaos and complexity. For some, he’s a truth crusader asking tough questions to the powers that be, the questions that many in the mainstream media fear to ask. For many others, Dhruv sits at the far left, always finding what’s wrong with the governments and those running it.
However, the topics of Dhruv’s videos range from “Inside the world’s no.1 cycling city” to “Inside World’s Smallest Country“, mutual funds explainer, and so on. While political regimes and political ideologies are among some of his top picks, Dhruv spends a lot of time explaining everyday things in the world.
In this episode of Outliers podcast, I discussed a range of topics with Dhruv, from growing up to the thinking behind his selection of topics and his science fiction view of the world going forward.
When I announced the upcoming episode of Outliers with Dhruv earlier this week, I was flooded with many messages asking me not to publish this, some even threatening to stop listening to my podcasts. I responded to most of them directly, and through private messages, and also ignored many comments because I really don’t care about threats that ask me to stop doing my job.
I also asked Dhruv a couple of additional questions in the spirit of being objective about everything.
A bunch of listeners of this podcast are hoping you’ll clarify your stand on #BlackLivesMatter and feminism (movements), especially after the latest video.
I don’t want to talk much about this issue because so much discussion has already been done. As I said in my video, I support “the BLM” and feminism movements, and I even showed why the argument for “all lives matter” is a wrong argument and what’s the fallacy behind that. But at the same time, I just gave my opinion that if I still had to….if it was still in my hands to name this movement at present, I would have probably named it something else, something which is more inclusive like “racial equality” for example or “gender equality” for feminism in this case. Because I see that at present what’s the biggest criticism of these movements is that people are saying that they are too biased and they don’t really want equality. So I think, if I was the manager of that movement, I would rename it, so more people are attracted to the principles and the goals of that movement.
Obviously this could not have been done in the past because we’re not at this time in the past when the initial feminism movements were going on. So, for those times, the name was very good….like I am talking about the first wave and the second wave of feminism….1960s was the second wave.
Have to ask this to you—in the polarized world we’re living in, do you find yourself on the extreme right or left? And why?
I find myself in the center actually, neither the extreme left or the extreme right because I believe the ideology spectrum is a bit like a horseshoe magnet, the extreme right and the extreme left are very similar to each other in many ways. Even though they think they are not.