The Ben Shapiro Show - Dave Rubin | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 92

00:00:00.000 All the media has to do.

00:00:01.000 You want to shut up Ben Shapiro.

00:00:03.000 You want to stop scary Dave Rubin.

00:00:05.000 You know what you do?

00:00:06.000 You start behaving honestly.

00:00:09.000 Free speech is more important than ever.

00:00:11.000 As the coronavirus lockdown continues, protests have broken out around the country as people display their First Amendment rights.

00:00:17.000 City police officials are now labeling protesting government action non-essential.

00:00:22.000 Some have resulted in arrests.

00:00:23.000 This is a great moment to reflect on where free speech starts, where it ends, and its importance to the citizenry.

00:00:29.000 Now's a perfect time to welcome back one of our first guests ever to the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special, my friend, Dave Rubin.

00:00:35.000 Dave joined us a little over a year ago and has since grown his show, The Rubin Report, to be the most watched show about free speech on YouTube.

00:00:43.000 He's not afraid to have anyone on whether they agree or disagree.

00:00:45.000 He's a firm believer in everyone having a chance to have their say.

00:00:49.000 His new book, Don't Burn This Book, is available everywhere Tuesday, April 28th, and it provides a roadmap for free thinking in an increasingly censored world.

00:00:57.000 In our discussion, we talk about social media's role in the spread of information, three defining moments that caused Dave to leave the left, what American government and society will look like when we come out of the pandemic, and the amazing story of Dave meeting President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

00:01:10.000 Welcome to today's Sunday special of the United States.

00:01:20.000 Of course, our guest today is Dave Rubin.

00:01:23.000 Well, we have bonus questions with Dave, as we do every single week.

00:01:25.000 If you want access to the bonus questions, you should go become a member.

00:01:28.000 All you have to do is head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.

00:01:31.000 Go to the top of our homepage over at dailywire.com.

00:01:33.000 You'll see exactly where to click to subscribe.

00:01:36.000 Once you do, you remember, now you can view all of our bonus questions for Dave and for all the rest of our stellar Sunday special guests.

00:01:42.000 So I'm excited to welcome back my good friend, Dave Rubin.

00:01:45.000 I believe he's the first repeat guest ever on the Sunday Special.

00:01:48.000 So Dave, congratulations.

00:01:49.000 I think you were maybe our first guest ever, and I think you're our first repeat guest.

00:01:52.000 So you have made history here, sir.

00:01:54.000 Shapiro, I'm very excited because, you know, I was a little ahead of the curve on leaving The Left, and then I'm a little ahead of the curve on The Home Studio, and I'm the first repeat guest on the Ben Shapiro Sunday Special.

00:02:05.000 I believe Peterson was your debut show.

00:02:08.000 I was number two.

00:02:09.000 That's right.

00:02:11.000 You know, I'll take it.

00:02:12.000 So you have a brand new book out called Don't Burn This Book.

00:02:14.000 People should go buy it, and then they should burn it, and then they should buy a second copy of Don't Burn This Book so Dave makes more money and fulfills his publishing advance.

00:02:20.000 The book is great.

00:02:22.000 I mean, I blurbed it, so I read it a long time ago.

00:02:24.000 The book has a lot of really terrific advice.

00:02:27.000 There's a lot to it.

00:02:28.000 We'll get to that in just a second.

00:02:29.000 I first want to talk a little bit about, you know, the only thing that's happening in the news, like literally anywhere on Earth, like literally there is nothing else happening.

00:02:36.000 There is no sports.

00:02:36.000 There are no movies.

00:02:37.000 There is nothing.

00:02:38.000 So how have you been living out?

00:02:41.000 How have you been living out the coronavirus disaster as you hunker down with your husband and dog?

00:02:47.000 Yeah, well, I guess I was a little prescient in that I decided to have a home studio before it was cool.

00:02:53.000 I mean, in a lot of ways, my life has not changed because my house is my workplace.

00:02:59.000 This is my garage.

00:03:01.000 You know, my crew is no longer coming.

00:03:02.000 So my crew is probably operating how your crew now operates, which is in their own homes.

00:03:07.000 So we had to buy a lot of equipment and we got a satellite on the roof for Internet and the rest of it.

00:03:11.000 But in terms of my day to day life, I mean, we're hunkered down here.

00:03:15.000 I did get a new dog who is about to be put down because they were closing all the shelters in LA.

00:03:20.000 But you know I'm basically doing okay and what I'm really trying to do more than anything else which I think most of us are trying to do although we don't really talk about it is I'm trying to take this time to kind of better myself in whatever ways that I can.

00:03:33.000 I've been cooking more, I've been doing a little gardening, I'm trying to eat right and exercise a little bit more, and I just think that whenever we get through this thing, and as we were saying right before we started, it's like we don't know when this thing is going to end at this point and it seems like the experts often know less than us, It's like when we do get past this, I think there's going to be real fertile ground for new ideas to flourish.

00:03:54.000 I think people are going to be thinking about their jobs and their lives differently.

00:03:58.000 Do you want to commute?

00:03:59.000 Do you want to live in a big city?

00:04:01.000 How reliant do you want to be on all of the institutions that we have?

00:04:04.000 What kind of information do you want to get and where do you want to get it from?

00:04:08.000 I think there's so many things being flipped upside down right now.

00:04:12.000 My goal really is to just try to remain a voice of sanity through that.

00:04:17.000 We'll see if that actually comes to fruition, but that's the plan.

00:04:20.000 Yeah, one of the things that'll be interesting to see is whether people sort of revert to their political priors after this.

00:04:26.000 So a major life event, and this is the biggest event any of us have ever seen.

00:04:29.000 I mean, this really does make 9-11 in terms of scale look Almost.

00:04:33.000 Almost piddling.

00:04:34.000 I mean, I was there for 9-11.

00:04:35.000 It was a life-changing event.

00:04:37.000 And 3,000 Americans died.

00:04:39.000 We are, you know, in the midst of a global pandemic, which is not just affecting the United States, it's affecting everybody.

00:04:43.000 The government is forcibly shutting down the economy for everybody.

00:04:46.000 People are staying at home.

00:04:48.000 And yet you see, and it's really fascinating to watch on Twitter, Everybody has reverted back to their priors.

00:04:54.000 Like, nobody is willing to have a conversation in almost the same way that nobody was willing to have a conversation five minutes ago.

00:04:58.000 Now, the conversation five minutes ago was a little bit more woke.

00:05:01.000 It was a lot more about, you know, identity politics.

00:05:03.000 And now the conversation seems to be about shaming people for going out to the grocery store more than anything else.

00:05:08.000 Or on the other hand, people screaming about how if you are worried about coronavirus, then it's because you definitely want to shut down the economy.

00:05:15.000 But it does seem like there's a certain comfort level that we see people take in reverting to all of their prior biases about the world.

00:05:21.000 Ben, are you telling me that you haven't been a good citizen of Los Angeles and listened to our Mayor Eric Garcetti who wants us to snitch on our neighbors if they are doing something that they're not allowed to do?

00:05:31.000 Maybe getting four feet within another neighbor or something like that?

00:05:35.000 I mean, you've got to be a good citizen here in Los Angeles.

00:05:38.000 But yes, everybody is sort of reverting to that.

00:05:40.000 But you hit on something interesting there, which is that the woke thing does feel like it's crumbling right now.

00:05:46.000 And look, this thing has an inertia to it that I don't think, it's like Freddy Krueger, you gotta bury its bones many times over.

00:05:53.000 However, I think what a lot of people are realizing right now is that when we have real problems, a real worldwide pandemic, a real situation that can cause real death and collapse an economy and a million other cascading things, that the gender or sexuality a real situation that can cause real death and collapse an economy and a million other cascading things, that the gender or sexuality or skin

00:06:17.000 So I think that the average person who is maybe on the fence about wokeness might actually be seeing through it right now, because when there's real stuff, when the stuff's really hitting the fan, none of that matters.

00:06:30.000 And my hope is that the average person will take that with them post-coronavirus, but we'll see.

00:06:37.000 So Dave, I want to ask you how you think politics are going to change beyond the woke.

00:06:40.000 But first, I want to thank our sponsors here at the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:06:43.000 I mean, this is a really rough time for everybody, people who are listening, people who are watching, certainly for our advertisers.

00:06:49.000 You know, a lot of businesses are having a really tough time right now.

00:06:52.000 We are so grateful to our advertisers that they make it possible for us to continue to bring this show to you every single week.

00:06:58.000 And we really appreciate you patronizing our advertisers and using their products.

00:07:01.000 They appreciate it too.

00:07:03.000 Thank you so much and thanks to our advertisers for keeping this show and shows like it going.

00:07:07.000 We're all trying to get through this together and I think that we will.

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00:08:14.000 Okay, so let's talk about how politics are going to change.

00:08:18.000 Maybe permanently, maybe not.

00:08:19.000 Where do you think politics are going from here?

00:08:21.000 So you've been, you've had a pretty good track record here of giving a name to each year.

00:08:24.000 Like last year was the year of the dragon and also of odd alliances.

00:08:29.000 This year, what was your call for this year at the beginning of this year?

00:08:33.000 So two years ago, I called it the Year of Unusual Alliances, and that's really when the whole IDW thing, Intellectual Dark Web, sprung out of sort of nowhere, although for people like us, it wasn't nowhere because it was bubbling on the internet from quite some time.

00:08:47.000 But the example I always use of why I called it Unusual Alliances was you and Sam Harris.

00:08:53.000 I mean, two guys who disagree on literally everything from the nature of reality, God and religion and belief to taxes and states' rights.

00:09:05.000 I mean, you guys disagree on everything, but you basically became allies through the free speech thing and through open inquiry and being able to debate ideas.

00:09:14.000 And then this year, I said, this will be the year that wokeism collapses.

00:09:19.000 Now, I didn't anticipate that it was going to be through coronavirus, as we just talked about.

00:09:23.000 But what I did see and I still see happening, and I think you can even see it right now, is that wokeness wasn't going to be able to survive the democratic process, the democratic nomination, because it is a constant... 0.99

00:09:40.000 It's not a competition to destroy.

00:09:42.000 It's not a competition to build. 0.71

00:09:44.000 So ultimately, and this is what's happening with Bernie right now as he's limping now towards the convention, if he even makes it that far, is that at the end he is going to be viewed by tomorrow's progressives as just an old failed white man.

00:09:58.000 And you can see them, you can see AOC kind of turning on him right now.

00:10:03.000 And at the end of the day, because he decided not to burn the whole thing down when he lost to Hillary last time, and it doesn't look like he's going to burn the whole thing down when they hand this thing to Biden, who everyone knows is completely incapable of leading this country.

00:10:16.000 I mean, Biden should be retired right now.

00:10:18.000 That's just the sad truth. 0.94

00:10:19.000 They will have to take Bernie out because he's an old white man. 0.60

00:10:24.000 And then the endless competition to outwoke each other also will burn out.

00:10:30.000 So when Biden now says that no matter what, his VP is going to be a woman, and And then at the same time, Biden will also tell you, as he said at the LGBT Equality Forum, he said that it's not your birth gender which will be the deciding factor on what prison you go to, it's whatever gender you identify as.

00:10:48.000 So it's like none of this makes any sense, and I don't think it can survive in a year of a Democratic election.

00:10:55.000 That being said, because the Democrats right now are just such a freaking mess, because there is no unifying principle on the left anymore, the right, Which I would say now I'm loosely a part of the right, let's say.

00:11:10.000 There is a unifying principle.

00:11:12.000 The principle that you and say Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and Nikki Haley and all these people have is basically you believe in the Constitution and you believe in individual rights.

00:11:22.000 Now you may not always all act on it appropriately or exactly perfectly or something like that, but that is the basis for your arguments, right?

00:11:30.000 The left has a sort of, well, government, should do everything and let's just fight about how much it should do.

00:11:37.000 That's not really a unifying principle.

00:11:39.000 That's just sort of, I feel a certain way about something and someone else feels another certain way.

00:11:44.000 The easiest example of this, of course, would be, Bernie says he's for $15 minimum wage and then Rashida Tlaib says she's for $20 minimum wage.

00:11:51.000 And it's like, well, yeah, you have no reason to say you're for 15.

00:11:55.000 That doesn't make sense in an age of automation and iPads anyway.

00:11:58.000 So why not 20?

00:11:59.000 Why not 25?

00:12:00.000 And if you don't agree with me, you're probably a racist or a bigot or something because you don't like poor people and blah, blah, blah.

00:12:06.000 So they don't have a unifying principle anymore.

00:12:08.000 And I think because of that identity, politics, wokeness, it's all going to start eating itself.

00:12:13.000 And then, you know, just surrounded All of that.

00:12:16.000 You put that all in the bubble of now what's going on with coronavirus and people realizing that borders are important, that states' rights are important, that guns so you can protect your family are important, and a series of other things.

00:12:28.000 I think there's a huge opportunity for conservatives, libertarians, whatever you want to call that group at the moment.

00:12:35.000 Well, it'll be really interesting to see whether there is an actual political realignment, because even inside the conservative movement, I've talked about this pretty extensively, there's been this gap that's opened up between sort of the classical liberal wing, libertarian-ish wing of the conservative movement, which is where I consider myself, like I'm very much a conservative on social policies, but not via government, via social fabric.

00:12:54.000 Then there's a group of people who have started calling themselves sort of common good conservatives, people who believe that it's the job of the government to actually Facilitate the social institutions that I may like but don't think government actually is able to facilitate.

00:13:06.000 They believe the government should be used to facilitate those social institutions and they use language that sounds very much like some of the language of the left.

00:13:12.000 It's just that their priorities are different.

00:13:13.000 It's the government is supposed to back this institution as opposed to this institution.

00:13:17.000 And so they're just arguing over which institution government is supposed to back, not What is the generalized role of government in people's lives?

00:13:26.000 And so there's this gap that's been opened.

00:13:28.000 I think I wonder if that's the next gap that's going to open and it's going to lead to a pretty significant political realignment where you see folks like Tucker Carlson, who's You know, brilliant and Tucker's a terrific entertainer and a good thinker, where you see Tucker, you know, kind of coming around to the Elizabeth Warren wing on the one hand, and then you see maybe some dispossessed Democrats on the other hand going, I'm not really interested in having the government control every aspect of my life and moving over into the sort of libertarian camp.

00:13:53.000 And I could see that opening up that gap.

00:13:55.000 In the aftermath of this particularly, because the more I've been considering it, Dave, the more I've been thinking that what we could be entering is an era where you have one group of people who say roaring 20s almost reaction to this, which is, okay, they locked us in our houses for months on end.

00:14:10.000 They told us I can't do anything I want to do.

00:14:12.000 And when this is over, I'm going to do whatever I want to do.

00:14:14.000 And I don't want the government in my business.

00:14:15.000 I don't want the government dealing with me economically.

00:14:17.000 I don't want the government telling me what I can and cannot do with my life and just leave me the hell alone.

00:14:22.000 There's the final, you know, the Rand Paulian libertarian moment finally arrived.

00:14:26.000 And on the other hand, you could see people saying, listen, this was a pitch perfect example of why massive government is necessary.

00:14:33.000 Sure, there were failures of massive government and all of this, but we need bigger and stronger government in everybody's life, particularly if we end up with a significant recession out of this, which seems to be A high probability with 30 million people unemployed and a 10%, 13% unemployment rate.

00:14:45.000 You can see people come out of this saying, not, I need less government in my life, but I need desperately more government in my life because I have no other choices.

00:14:52.000 That could be the next battle.

00:14:53.000 And that's a battle more about kind of fundamental principles even than wokeism is.

00:14:58.000 So I love that you're asking about this and I sort of loosely write about this idea in the book because I'm sort of new to this wing, right?

00:15:06.000 So I'm in that classical liberal libertarian part where you are and you and I have discussed where you are more conservative socially and I can get on board that because you're not trying to legislate my life.

00:15:17.000 So let's put that aside for a second.

00:15:19.000 I actually think that my hope would be that the roaring 20s of get the government out of my life, I know how I wanna live, let's bring as much back to the states right now.

00:15:30.000 Now look, I understand, and our founders understood, by the way, that the states can't absolutely do everything, right?

00:15:37.000 The states can't control the borders of a national country.

00:15:41.000 They can control their own borders.

00:15:43.000 There are certain things that we need the federal government to do.

00:15:47.000 But my hope is that most people are gonna realize Boy, we had this coronavirus thing, and what did I do the entire time?

00:15:53.000 I complained about Trump, I complained about the doctors, I complained about the supply chain, I complained about our relationship to China, all of these things.

00:16:02.000 And maybe, just maybe, the answer isn't that we have to give more power to all of these things.

00:16:08.000 The answer is that we have to take the power back.

00:16:10.000 But also, on your point about this split between common good conservatism and maybe the classical liberal libertarian side, You know, there was an interesting debate a few months ago that was happening in the Twittersphere about how conservatives should view porn, right?

00:16:24.000 Now, my personal view is, as long as you're not doing something illegal, so it can't be child porn or something like that, that people ultimately have the choices that they want in their life and you can view it, you can be part of it, whatever.

00:16:36.000 That's my view of it.

00:16:38.000 I do understand the more conservative side of it, which says, well, you know, most of the women that get involved in this are drug addicted, and then they end up in abusive relationships, and there's all sorts of criminal activity, and mafia, and all of that stuff, and that their view is that the common good, conservatism, has to stop that because that, over the course of time, will erode the family, and then you've eroded society.

00:17:00.000 I actually understand that argument quite well, and I'm sympathetic to it.

00:17:04.000 I'm actually not even saying it's wrong.

00:17:06.000 I personally Put more of a primacy, more of an importance on individual freedom and allowing people to make mistakes along the way and then hopefully over time they reel those mistakes in.

00:17:19.000 I think that's what the human experience is.

00:17:22.000 So I don't want to use the government for those sort of moral moves.

00:17:26.000 But that's a great place for conservatives, the common good conservatives and the classical liberal libertarians to keep arguing that out and have that push and pull without trying to destroy each other.

00:17:38.000 And again, where that is on the other side, where they debate things without trying to destroy each other, I don't know where that is.

00:17:45.000 Well, in a second, I wanna ask you about whether people are experiencing coronavirus as a wake-up call, because in your new book, Don't Burn This Book, you talk about your own wake-up calls and how you ended up kind of leaving the left and ending up where you are politically, We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:19:02.000 So Dave, I want to talk about the wake-up calls that you talk about.

00:19:05.000 So you lay forth a bunch of lessons in your book, and there really is a lot of great advice in this book.

00:19:10.000 And I remember when you were first writing the book, and you and I were discussing exactly what the book was going to be about, because I asked you about it, and you'd suggested that it might be sort of why you left the left.

00:19:18.000 And I remember being slightly critical of the title, actually.

00:19:21.000 And you obviously took my advice.

00:19:23.000 I mean, clearly that was the deciding factor here.

00:19:25.000 And you decided to move in a different direction.

00:19:27.000 One of the things I love about the book is that it really is a guide to action and sort of a mixture of your story and also things that you've learned along the way here.

00:19:36.000 One of the things you talk about is the necessity of embracing wake-up calls that you experience in your life.

00:19:41.000 And you talk in your book about the situations that led you to sort of these Come to Jesus moments, for lack of a better term, the road to Damascus stuff.

00:19:49.000 I remember that my mentor, Andrew Breitbart, always used to consider the Clarence Thomas hearings his sort of wake-up call, because he was watching as the Democrats defended Bill Clinton, hitting on anything that had two legs and some things that didn't have two legs.

00:20:00.000 At the same time, they were ripping up Clarence Thomas, and he thought of himself, he thought, this is crazy. 0.95

00:20:04.000 I mean, the hypocrisy here is nuts.

00:20:06.000 You talk about your wake-up calls.

00:20:07.000 So what were your wake-up calls that led you to move from a guy who was doing stuff for the Young Turks to being a guy who, I think it's fair to say, is fairly critical of the Young Turks?

00:20:15.000 Well, I mean, I just don't care about the Young Turks. 1.00

00:20:18.000 So I lay out three wake-up calls specifically, three moments that happened to me over the last couple of years that really sort of sparked and then unleashed my political awakening.

00:20:28.000 The one that I've spoke the least about, so I think it would be the most interesting to talk to you about, is a guy that I'm sure you know, David Webb.

00:20:34.000 You must know David Webb from Fox and Sirius XM, right?

00:20:37.000 Yeah, so David Webb, I was once on the Young Turks, and now remember I'm a lefty, I'm a progressive, the whole freaking thing, I'm on the Young Turks network, and they're playing a clip of Fox News, and David Webb was on Fox News, and it doesn't even matter what he was talking about.

00:20:53.000 All of the hosts that I was on the panel with started saying that he's an Uncle Tom, and he's a sellout, and he hates his own community, and he's self-hating.

00:21:01.000 All of the things that you hear about anyone who dare be a black conservative, right?

00:21:05.000 So we hear this about our friend Larry Elder, we hear this about Thomas Sowell, Candace Owens, etc., etc. 0.99

00:21:11.000 Now, I'm watching them go on and on about what a self-hating black man he is and what a sellout he is.

00:21:16.000 And what they didn't know was that years before I had joined the Young Turks, I used to have a show on Sirius XM, a radio show, and David was on the right channel, and I was a big lefty at the time, but we met in the hallway one day, and we quickly struck up a friendship, and I used to go on his show every other week or so, and we would debate topics. 0.96

00:21:32.000 We disagreed on everything.

00:21:33.000 I mean, he was firmly on the right.

00:21:36.000 This is my left hand.

00:21:37.000 I was firmly on the left, he was firmly on the right, and we would debate everything, and then afterwards, we'd go out to dinner, and we'd have some whiskey, and it was all good.

00:21:44.000 And I know that David Webb is a good man.

00:21:47.000 I know he is an honest man who's fighting for what he believes in.

00:21:50.000 And then to see a bunch of supposed tolerant pro-diversity lefties hear a black man say some things that they don't like and then call himself hating, it became so starkly obvious to me That this was racism. 0.63

00:22:07.000 Oh, you guys see a black man who doesn't behave the way you expect a black man, not expect, the way you demand a black man behave, and now he's all of the worst things in the world. 1.00

00:22:19.000 Well, what is prejudice? 0.97

00:22:20.000 It is prejudging.

00:22:22.000 And you are prejudging him.

00:22:24.000 You think black people must all think the same thing. 1.00

00:22:27.000 That actually is bigotry. 0.80

00:22:30.000 That actually is racism.

00:22:32.000 And I think what happened to me in that moment was it wasn't ephemeral anymore.

00:22:37.000 It was actually real and tangible because I knew him.

00:22:41.000 So it wasn't just some imaginary person on television.

00:22:43.000 So that was one that really did it to me.

00:22:46.000 The two others, one of them I've spoke quite a bit about and I know you know quite well, which was when Sam Harris was on Real Time with Bill Maher.

00:22:54.000 And Ben Affleck, they were talking about radical Islam and Sam was saying, you know, we have to be able to criticize ideas, but you shouldn't be bigoted towards people, which is such a simple but important idea.

00:23:04.000 You should be able to criticize any idea.

00:23:06.000 You should be able to criticize any religious idea.

00:23:09.000 You should be able to criticize any political idea, any idea about if you don't like how the NBA rules are, you should be able to criticize those rules too.

00:23:16.000 But you don't want to be bigoted towards people.

00:23:19.000 And that was all that Sam Harris, who I didn't even know who he was.

00:23:22.000 I was watching it live and I didn't even know who Sam Harris was at the time.

00:23:25.000 But obviously I knew Bill Maher.

00:23:26.000 And Affleck turns to the two of them and the famous now infamous line is he calls them gross and racist.

00:23:33.000 And they were nothing of the sort.

00:23:36.000 And then immediately I watched the feeding frenzy over the next couple of weeks of all the usual suspects, Daily Beast and Vox and Hove Poe and BuzzFeed, suddenly saying that Bill Maher is a racist.

00:23:47.000 And this mild-mannered neuroscientist who said nothing racist, he was a racist.

00:23:50.000 And I thought, man, Bill Maher has stood up for everything you guys purport to believe in.

00:23:55.000 For 20 years, he's been, 20 years, maybe 30 years, he's been fighting the fight of the left, the good fight of the left, relentlessly annealing Republicans and conservatives, rightly or wrongly.

00:24:07.000 Now, because Ben Affleck, Batman, says one thing that sort of sounds right if you don't think about it, now he's evil.

00:24:14.000 And that was another wake-up call to me because I saw them doing that with everyone, anyone you disagree with.

00:24:20.000 is suddenly evil.

00:24:21.000 And then very briefly, the last one, and this was the final straw for me, I had already planned on leaving, but this was in January, right around the middle of the month, January of 2015.

00:24:30.000 It was when the Charlie Hebdo attacks, a bunch of jihadists broke into the Charlie Hebdo cartoonist offices in Paris, France.

00:24:38.000 And immediately I was on a panel on the Young Turks and there was no, there was almost no sympathy for the victims.

00:24:45.000 The sympathy suddenly went to, "Oh, you poked a bear. 1.00

00:24:50.000 You shouldn't make cartoons of these things.

00:24:53.000 Now, meanwhile, they made fun of Orthodox Jews all the time with Charlie Hebdo.

00:24:56.000 Of course, they made fun of the Pope and Christianity and every idea under the sun. 0.65

00:25:01.000 But suddenly, if you made fun of this set of ideas, even though Charlie Hebdo wasn't making fun of Muslim people, they were making fun of jihadists.

00:25:08.000 Which we need to do, by the way.

00:25:09.000 We need to mock the things that would love to control us and destroy us.

00:25:14.000 But the outrage had nothing to do with the victims.

00:25:17.000 The outrage was that we might then cause bigotry to other people.

00:25:21.000 And it just seemed so insidious and backwards Highlighted by one of the hosts pounding on the table and screaming about how 90-something percent of the Charlie Hebdo covers were against Muslims.

00:25:33.000 And it's something like 3 out of 400 or something like that.

00:25:36.000 There were far more against the Pope and Orthodox Jews and the rest of it.

00:25:39.000 But anyway, all of these things they just added up to where the rubber started meeting the road.

00:25:45.000 That was really it.

00:25:46.000 And then suddenly over the course of the next year, When I started doing my long-form interview show, once I left the Young Turks, I started talking to some conservatives, you included, and Larry Elder, and a bunch of others, and suddenly I was able to sit across from people who I had some pretty stark disagreements with, but you didn't want to kill me for it.

00:26:04.000 You didn't want to silence me for it.

00:26:05.000 You didn't want to take my job for it.

00:26:08.000 And then that really opened up a whole other world that I didn't expect.

00:26:11.000 And one of the things that you talk about there, and that I think really is the crux of the ability to have a conversation, is not maligning your opponent's sort of perspective, not the perspective, maligning their motives.

00:26:23.000 And it seems like the easiest thing to do, Twitter is the worst for this.

00:26:27.000 I mean, you talk in your book, and you've talked before, about how one of the things that I think makes, and I think it's one of the things that makes you a happier person and a good voice, is that you really have disconnected in some pretty significant ways from social media.

00:26:39.000 Social media rewards people from aligning other people's motives.

00:26:42.000 It's not just that you can wreck somebody's argument or point out where they've been wrong.

00:26:46.000 It's that if they did something wrong, it wasn't a pure mistake. 1.00

00:26:48.000 It's because they must be stupid or they must be evil. 1.00

00:26:52.000 And social media absolutely rewards that. 1.00

00:26:54.000 It's sort of a microcosm of the darkest side of humanity, but so much of politics is built around it.

00:27:00.000 So you've made the decision that you are going to really restrict your social media diet in a pretty significant way.

00:27:06.000 Even I, right?

00:27:07.000 I have a social media diet once a week of Friday night to Saturday night.

00:27:11.000 I can't be on social media.

00:27:12.000 That wasn't enough of a diet for me.

00:27:14.000 I mean, I remember that I sort of took your advice and Several months ago, maybe almost a year ago at this point, actually, I started really, really restricting and cutting back on my use of Twitter.

00:27:23.000 Now, I've fallen back into the old drug fix in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic because everybody is searching for news all the time, but it's not good for the soul.

00:27:31.000 It really is bad for us.

00:27:32.000 I wonder if you want to talk a little bit about your social media diet and how you've restricted your intake of this sort of stuff.

00:27:38.000 Well, I remember when I first started doing this weekend off thing and you tweeted at me and you're like, yeah, Dave, we've been doing it for 5,000 years.

00:27:45.000 It's called Shabbat.

00:27:46.000 And it's like, yeah, well, I took Shabbat and I added an extra day because I really try to take the weekends off.

00:27:52.000 Although I'm in the same situation as you during this Corona situation, I have been on there a bit more.

00:27:57.000 But one of the things that I'm trying to do is I try not to tweet about politics on the weekends, but I'll try to tweet about food or music that I'm listening to or my community at RubinReport.com.

00:28:07.000 We do a week, a weekend movie together where we watch and then we do a video chat after.

00:28:11.000 I'm trying to use it for some other things other than the constant destruction.

00:28:14.000 But I think to your broader point about how we all behave on there, look, we try.

00:28:20.000 I see it with you and I know for myself. 0.99

00:28:21.000 It's like there are moments when AOC says something so stupid and so patently dishonest and so twisted that you want to destroy her, right? 0.99

00:28:32.000 Anyone watching this knows there's enough videos on YouTube, Ben Shapiro Capital destroys College Kid or whatever, not coming from Ben Shapiro or The Daily Wire, usually coming from somebody else. 0.99

00:28:41.000 But the nature of how we all do this internet game and how the clicks work and the algorithm work, it sort of constantly rewards, I don't even want to say bad behavior, because sometimes people kind of do deserve to get called out on their nonsense.

00:28:54.000 But it rewards sort of this endless game of one-upsmanship.

00:28:59.000 So for me, I have found that if I try not to look at it on the weekends, I find that helpful.

00:29:04.000 I really, really try not to, and this one I would really recommend for anyone, is don't bring your cell phone, your iPhone, whatever you got, don't bring it into your bedroom.

00:29:15.000 Like, don't, it should not be the last thing you look at at night, and it shouldn't be the first thing that you look at in the morning.

00:29:21.000 Just doing that will give you, so that when you get out of bed, because otherwise you do it.

00:29:25.000 You grab, you go over to your nightstand, you grab your phone, you look at it, and for people like us, I can do a quick scroll and have a hundred people tell me to go F myself before I even brush my teeth.

00:29:35.000 That's not a great way to start the day.

00:29:37.000 You probably get 300 doing it, and I might be a little conservative in the numbers there.

00:29:42.000 So I think doing some simple things like that and then the other thing that I do.

00:29:46.000 is I do this August off the grid, which not this past year, but the year before you welcomed me back on the grid after no news, no electronics, no television, no nothing.

00:29:57.000 And guess what?

00:29:58.000 It turned out that I didn't even miss that much.

00:30:00.000 You know, a lot of the stuff that you told me about that I missed during my August off the grid, I did miss the John McCain had passed away.

00:30:06.000 So that that's a big news story.

00:30:08.000 That was one.

00:30:08.000 But a lot of the stuff that you told me about was about Michael Cohen.

00:30:12.000 Think how actually irrelevant that is, if you think about today's world right now.

00:30:17.000 And I think if there's ever a time to step away from some of that stuff, I think August is the right time to do it.

00:30:22.000 End your summer in a clear-minded way.

00:30:24.000 And if you can't do that, try two one-week things per year.

00:30:28.000 Christmas to, it doesn't matter what religion you are, but we all shut down basically from Christmas to New Year's, right?

00:30:34.000 So take that one week, just don't be on social media.

00:30:36.000 Or the last week of the summer, right before Memorial Day.

00:30:40.000 You know, that last week of August into that Tuesday, basically, after Memorial Day.

00:30:44.000 Just to shut it down a little bit, because you just got to remember, Ben, we all, even though we're creatures of this thing, we make our livings on this thing, we love this thing in so many ways, none of this existed 25 years ago.

00:30:57.000 We are technological adolescents in this thing, and we don't know how it's changing us.

00:31:02.000 And one of the things I am concerned about, even though, as I said before, I'm hopeful because of Corona, is that right now we're only socializing because of this stuff, right?

00:31:10.000 This is our only mode of outside communication.

00:31:12.000 You've got your wife there and your kids there, but beyond that, we can Zoom with family and friends, but now everything about our communication with the outside world is now dictated by big tech.

00:31:23.000 And there's a million reasons related to censorship why that's dangerous.

00:31:27.000 So I just think we have to be careful with all these tools.

00:31:30.000 We don't know exactly what they are.

00:31:31.000 We grab them, we love them.

00:31:33.000 And you may find out that fire can be used for bad, not just to heat the food.

00:31:38.000 So in a second, I want to ask you about some of the statements you just made about social media and censorship, because you've started a company that is largely directed at fighting against that sort of censorship organization.

00:31:49.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

00:31:51.000 First, it's kind of rough to shop for mom.

00:31:53.000 I mean, right?

00:31:53.000 What does mom actually want from you?

00:31:55.000 Yeah, I could do the flowers, I suppose, but you know what's a really meaningful gift?

00:31:58.000 How about preserving your family's memories?

00:32:01.000 Legacy box.

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00:32:03.000 It's a super simple mail-in service to have all your home movies and pictures digitally preserved on the thumb drive, DVD, or the cloud.

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00:32:16.000 How about memories that aren't going to get dusty or fade away?

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00:32:25.000 We've been using Legacy Box.

00:32:26.000 I've done this for my parents.

00:32:27.000 We loaded up a bunch of films, film reels, sent it off to Legacy Box.

00:32:30.000 Can't wait to get those back.

00:32:31.000 Legacy Box is a way for you to easily and affordably digitally preserve your past.

00:32:35.000 The process from start to finish is really easy.

00:32:37.000 You pack, you send your tapes, their team digitizes everything by hand, and you get back perfectly preserved digital copies on a thumb drive, DVD, or the cloud, ready to watch, share, and enjoy.

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00:33:06.000 Alrighty, so let's talk a little bit about social media censorship.

00:33:09.000 So you've had wide experience, we have over at The Daily Wire also, obviously, of situations in which it feels like social media is cracking down on you.

00:33:17.000 Now, it would be ungrateful for me, here at The Daily Wire, to say that social media has been terrible to us.

00:33:22.000 It hasn't.

00:33:22.000 I mean, Facebook we've been wildly successful on.

00:33:24.000 Obviously, we have an incredibly successful YouTube channel.

00:33:26.000 But you've personally had lots of situations over at Rubin Report where they've demonetized your videos preemptively.

00:33:32.000 I remember they demonetized a conversation that I think you, Jordan, and I had that had 5 million views.

00:33:36.000 And they demonetized that one, if I'm not mistaken.

00:33:38.000 And they kind of, as a rule, they basically just demonetize you right off the bat over at YouTube for no apparent reason.

00:33:45.000 So what's your take on what should happen with these companies?

00:33:49.000 And I want you to talk a little about Locals.com because that's the company that you've started to try and fight some of this stuff without calling for overt government regulation.

00:33:56.000 Yeah, so look, my general premise on this is I want these companies to be able to operate however they want to operate.

00:34:03.000 Now, that does get a little messy because the amount of power that Google and Facebook and Twitter and YouTube now have over us is unimaginable, right?

00:34:11.000 The amount of information that they control and the way they control the highway of information 10 years ago, we could have never imagined how powerful that would be.

00:34:21.000 That being said, my preference is to get the government out of the way and you just let them do their thing.

00:34:27.000 Now, people will always say when I get 10 videos in a row demonetized or something, and I'm complaining about it on Twitter and I'm tagging Susan Wojcicki, who's the YouTube CEO, who I know you've had some conversations with and I've had some conversations with.

00:34:41.000 Of course, they were all off the record, at least for mine, so I can't even repeat what was said.

00:34:46.000 But people will say, Dave, how can you be complaining?

00:34:49.000 How can you be complaining?

00:34:50.000 You don't want the government to be involved.

00:34:51.000 How can you complain?

00:34:52.000 And it's like, no, no, no, no, no.

00:34:54.000 That's the complete reverse of how this all works.

00:34:57.000 I don't want the government involved.

00:34:58.000 So I'm using my voice to put pressure on the company as a public person to change their behavior.

00:35:04.000 That is that is the opportunity you have in a free society.

00:35:09.000 All that being said, I believe that we have no idea how they're manipulating us, whether it's through algorithmic tricks, or de-boosting, or switching search things, or shadow bans on Twitter.

00:35:23.000 I mean, one of the stories that barely anyone picked up, but as of January 1st, 2020, Twitter actually put shadow banning in their TOS, in their terms of service.

00:35:32.000 They are telling us that they will throttle certain accounts.

00:35:35.000 Now, they don't tell you who they're doing it to, or when they're doing it, But again, as especially right now in the midst of Corona, when the only way we can communicate with each other, we can't get together in real life, right?

00:35:46.000 As you've talked about, one of the things you miss right now is going to temple on Fridays.

00:35:50.000 Well, OK, you can't do that right now.

00:35:52.000 So they've all of the way you can get to the world is through their pipes.

00:35:56.000 So I'm very worried of all the things they can do to us.

00:35:59.000 And finally, after Screaming about it for a couple years and having all these conversations with all of you guys, I started Locals.com and the idea was that what we need for anyone that creates anything, whether you're a political guy like us, whether you're a gamer or an unboxer or you run a child's baseball league or you're a non-profit or a synagogue or a church or literally anything, anyone that wants a digital president, Presence.

00:36:26.000 You should own your digital home.

00:36:29.000 And that's what we're doing.

00:36:29.000 We're building digital homes for creators.

00:36:32.000 So you can have video and a news feed and you can like and you can comment.

00:36:37.000 You own all the content.

00:36:39.000 You own the data.

00:36:40.000 And here's the thing.

00:36:41.000 We're not creating a platform.

00:36:43.000 What we're creating are digital homes that you can choose to connect with other people's digital homes for a network effect.

00:36:48.000 So if someone comes into RubinReport.com And they're just a relentless troll or they're just, you know, just there to raise chaos.

00:36:57.000 I can boot them out.

00:36:58.000 Now, that's not that I don't respect free speech, but I don't welcome everyone in my home to say whatever they want to me.

00:37:04.000 You can say whatever you want on the public street out outside.

00:37:07.000 But the beauty is we're not deep.

00:37:09.000 If I kick someone out of my local, I'm not deplatforming them.

00:37:13.000 Because they can still be in anyone else's local as long as they abide by their rules.

00:37:16.000 You set your own rules in your local.

00:37:19.000 So, originally, the idea behind this was that we're creating digital seasteads.

00:37:23.000 You know, Peter Thiel was big on the idea of these seasteads floating in the water where we could do experimental medical treatments and all sorts of things.

00:37:31.000 I'm creating digital homes for creators.

00:37:32.000 We managed to raise a nice amount of money in the midst of coronavirus, which was probably the worst time since 9-11 to raise some money, but we did well.

00:37:41.000 And we're building, and we'll see what happens.

00:37:43.000 You know, can David beat Goliath in this case?

00:37:46.000 Can Dave beat Google?

00:37:47.000 But, you know, I just felt I had to put into practice the things that I'm always talking about, and that's what brought me to it.

00:37:47.000 I don't know.

00:37:47.000 We'll see.

00:37:54.000 I want to get back to some of the lessons that you have in Don't Burn This Book.

00:37:58.000 One of the ones that really struck me, because it was actually rather moving, is your discussion of your relationship with Jordan Peterson.

00:38:02.000 So obviously, Jordan is on the cover of the book.

00:38:04.000 You're very tight with Jordan.

00:38:06.000 I'm friends with Jordan, but you are really good friends with Jordan.

00:38:08.000 I mean, you were on the road with Jordan for two years as his warm-up act, essentially.

00:38:13.000 And the events are fantastic.

00:38:15.000 If you've ever been to one of the events with Jordan and Dave, I'd highly recommend it.

00:38:19.000 I was privileged to help warm up the crowd at one of the events, and it really was a lot of fun.

00:38:24.000 That might have been the best night of the whole tour because that was right at the end and we we did it here in LA at the Orpheum and you know when you do something in LA all the agents are there and there's just like a different feel to it the crowd was electric you were the surprise guest you brought me the little cake because people are the lefties are very upset that you won't cook bake me a gay wedding cake although I have no reason to believe you're a decent baker I don't want your cake but you brought me a cake

00:38:48.000 People were very exciting and it was a perfect example of the hypocrisy of the progressives because we do this event in front of 3,000 people. 0.85

00:38:55.000 The crowd goes freaking bananas. 0.88

00:38:58.000 We're up there, we're making jokes at each other, mocking each other.

00:39:01.000 You do a pretty funny impression of Jordan.

00:39:03.000 I mean everyone, it was a freaking love fest in that room. 0.95

00:39:06.000 People started posting the videos of it online and suddenly the amount of hate that I got Dave Rubin, self-hating gay, stands on stage with homophobe Ben Shapiro and white supremacist Jordan Peterson. 0.97

00:39:20.000 And it's like, man, we took a room of truly diverse people and gave them a great time.

00:39:26.000 We put differences aside.

00:39:28.000 That's what America is all about.

00:39:29.000 That's a beautiful thing that we need to cherish.

00:39:32.000 And here are the supposed tolerant people who are upset that we actually were able to accomplish that.

00:39:38.000 I know the fact that you and I can be nice to each other really does drive people up a wall.

00:39:42.000 It's pretty hilarious.

00:39:44.000 But to talk about Jordan for a second.

00:39:46.000 Obviously, Jordan's been going through some very, very difficult times.

00:39:51.000 You don't have to be a spokesperson here.

00:39:54.000 How he's doing?

00:39:54.000 Have you heard from him?

00:39:55.000 So I don't want to say anything that's not publicly known at the moment.

00:39:59.000 I did see him a few months ago.

00:40:00.000 I can tell you this.

00:40:01.000 He's getting better.

00:40:02.000 He will be back.

00:40:04.000 Watching some of the vitriol when it was announced that he had got hooked on these benzos, which by the way, there is a little bit of miscommunication or misinformation about what happened there.

00:40:13.000 He was very open and would talk about it often during the lectures that he was taking a small amount of this.

00:40:19.000 found out in the middle of the tour that his wife had what they thought was terminal cancer.

00:40:23.000 Thank God it turned out not to be terminal.

00:40:25.000 And she's actually doing much better.

00:40:27.000 But, you know, try to imagine this guy who was a mild-mannered psychologist and professor who suddenly became the world's father in a way.

00:40:39.000 You know, like really the preeminent public thinker of our time, traveling the world, the fame, the hit pieces.

00:40:45.000 You know, you remember the Enforce Monogamy hit piece in the New York Times, and you remember the Cathy Newman, so what you're saying is moment, and all those things.

00:40:54.000 Living through all of that, then thinking his wife is gonna die.

00:40:57.000 I mean, I was literally at lunch with him.

00:40:58.000 We were at lunch, at a steakhouse, of course, when he got the call about his wife.

00:41:03.000 I saw this man live through something Unbelievably extraordinarily horrible or as he would say brutal and always put his best foot forward.

00:41:13.000 So I can't say anything more about that specifically other than I never saw him break one of those rules and I saw him just trying to be true and if he gave me anything through osmosis or accident it's that.

00:41:28.000 I am really, really trying to do that.

00:41:30.000 And it doesn't mean that I do it every moment of every day, but I try to incorporate those ideas, those rules, and just being with someone that, you know, his whole mission really was, you know, if you fix yourself, if you clean your room, if you stand up straight with your shoulders back, you might start fixing the world.

00:41:46.000 And I saw him trying to do that.

00:41:48.000 And I saw him actually accomplishing it.

00:41:50.000 So, you know, he's got a little, he's got something to deal with right now.

00:41:53.000 And I have no doubt that he will deal with it and that he'll be back.

00:41:56.000 Yeah, you tell a pretty great story.

00:41:58.000 in the book about how Jordan dresses when he's out in public.

00:42:01.000 And it is true. 0.71

00:42:02.000 I mean, Jordan dresses the same way all the time. 0.92

00:42:04.000 I'm old enough to remember when Jordan dressed more like a schlump.

00:42:08.000 Like, I remember right at the beginning when Jordan was not nearly as natty in his attire as he is now.

00:42:12.000 And as you point out in the book, he sort of took it on himself that he was going to dress in a particular way, and then that is how Jordan dresses all the time.

00:42:19.000 And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the lessons that you've learned from Jordan.

00:42:24.000 Yeah, well the dressing, it's just a very simple one, but it's just to present yourself a certain way to the world.

00:42:31.000 And I asked him during the Q&A, so when we did the shows for your audience that didn't see any of the shows, I would do about 15 minutes of warm up up top and just get everybody laughing and having a good time.

00:42:40.000 Then Jordan would give about an hour and a half lecture and then we'd do about a 45 minute Q&A together at the end.

00:42:46.000 And one of the questions that would often come up is, Jordan, when did you become a middle-aged male fashion icon?

00:42:52.000 And he would say, well, you know, when we started this tour and I had this book, I thought I'm going to give it everything I got.

00:42:57.000 And part of that is is looking the part that I want to look.

00:43:01.000 So he went from those frumpy yellow shirts that you've seen on YouTube from those old lectures into three piece fitted, sharp, you know, suits and Italian shoes and the whole thing.

00:43:11.000 And there was one day where we were in Stockholm, Sweden.

00:43:14.000 And you know, it's so funny because Sweden is one of the places that the socialists and Bernie Sanders, they always point to Sweden as if it's their Shangri-La, this absurdly tiny, mostly homogenous country, which is less homogenous now and having all sorts of problems, but they don't like to tell you that.

00:43:27.000 But they always say we could just model ourselves after Sweden, we'd be in much better shape.

00:43:31.000 Well, the two shows that we did in Sweden, Sold out literally in three minutes, three minutes for two shows.

00:43:38.000 And the foreign minister of Sweden issued a statement when we came back to Sweden.

00:43:42.000 We did one and then I think we left for Finland.

00:43:44.000 We come back, the foreign minister issues a statement that she wishes that Jordan Peterson would crawl back from the rock that he came from.

00:43:52.000 And we get there and it's like people in Sweden have a serious, they have a crippling free speech issue there because the society is so conforming That people are just afraid to say what they think about anything, about immigration, about economics, the whole slew of things.

00:44:08.000 But the story quickly, we're in Stockholm and it was extremely windy that day and I just wanted a hat to walk around the city.

00:44:14.000 So I walk into H&M, which is one of their proud exports, I walk into H&M and I grab the hat.

00:44:21.000 There's a young kid who's probably about 20 years old in front of me online, and he says to the cashier in English, he says, uh, this is the first suit I've ever bought.

00:44:29.000 I'm going to see Dr. Jordan Peterson tonight.

00:44:32.000 And the cashier, who's about the same age, looks at him and says, I'm going to see Peterson tonight.

00:44:36.000 And I tapped the kid on the shoulder and I said, hi.

00:44:38.000 And they immediately knew who I was.

00:44:39.000 And I thought, this is absolutely incredible.

00:44:42.000 I am, I am across the world right now.

00:44:45.000 Right?

00:44:46.000 I'm across the world and here are two young people, one of whom who's buying the first suit of his life so that he can present himself in a responsible way to go to an event to hear how he can further fix his life.

00:45:00.000 How much more do you want of that?

00:45:01.000 And then one other I'll give you real quick.

00:45:02.000 We're in, I think it was in Dublin.

00:45:04.000 And you know, when you do these theater shows as the performer, you don't walk out the front cause you know, you'll get mobbed or whatever.

00:45:09.000 So they have a little theater door on the side.

00:45:11.000 We walk out after hours, and this is a long day of travel, and he's signing autographs, he's shaking hands, the whole thing.

00:45:17.000 We're beat at the end of the day.

00:45:19.000 We're in the alley, and we see these two guys hugging.

00:45:22.000 One looks like he's about 60, the other one's maybe in his mid-20s.

00:45:25.000 They come up to us, they both have tears in their eyes, and it turned out that they were a father and son who hadn't seen each other in five or six years, who by chance both were at the event because they had bought the book and started to fix their lives, and then they reconnected that night.

00:45:42.000 It's like, how much more of a real-world example of goodness do you wanna see?

00:45:47.000 And I could give you a million of those stories.

00:45:49.000 So in a second, I want to ask you about the the sort of hatred that you've received.

00:45:54.000 Obviously, we've all everybody in the IDW, as far as I'm aware, is maybe that's the uniting factor is that all of us have been the recipient of outsized hatred for the stuff that we have said or in many cases not said.

00:46:05.000 Get to that in just a second.

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00:47:16.000 So one of the chapters of the book, Dave, is about stop worrying about whether you're a Nazi.

00:47:22.000 Now, this is something that you've taken particularly on the chin for, because you've had the temerity to have on Rubin Report a bunch of people who people very often think of as pretty terrible.

00:47:33.000 And you've received an inordinate amount of rage about this, the suggestion being that if you bring them on the show and you ask them questions, but the questions aren't As directed and harsh as people would like them to be, this is somehow you platforming them.

00:47:47.000 So how do you deal with — the easier accusation, I think, is always the, they call you a Nazi, right?

00:47:52.000 Which is absurd. 0.89

00:47:53.000 You're a Jewish gay man who is a classical liberal. 0.96

00:47:56.000 Like, I can't think of many people other than myself who I would think of as less of Nazis. 0.72

00:48:00.000 You know, Jordan has been called a Nazi.

00:48:02.000 I've been called a Nazi.

00:48:03.000 Sam has been called a Nazi.

00:48:04.000 Like, everybody is called a Nazi.

00:48:05.000 And frankly, none of us — we did not see that coming.

00:48:08.000 But When it comes to the accusation that you, on your show, that you need to be harsher with some of the guests that you've had on, how do you deal with those sorts of accusations?

00:48:18.000 Well, you know, it's kind of funny to me because I think one of the things that made my show special is that in a time when everything was getting smaller, right?

00:48:26.000 Twitter and Vine videos at the time, Six Seconds and Instagram and the rest, everything was getting smaller.

00:48:31.000 And I said, I'm going to do a long form interview show.

00:48:34.000 And I'm actually thrilled that, you know, Rogan was starting right around the same time, or that you do this show.

00:48:39.000 I think I emailed you or I texted you, like, the week your show came out, and I was like, it's great you're doing an interview show.

00:48:46.000 First off, as a general rule, I don't even think, we're not in competition, but I believe in competition.

00:48:50.000 It's like, if you suddenly were like, just every interview we're doing made my interviews feel thin and pale and whatever, I would bust my butt even more.

00:48:58.000 I mean, that's, I always operate that way myself, and I know that you would do the same.

00:49:03.000 What I started doing was, let me have respectful conversation.

00:49:06.000 Everything on cable news is people destroying each other, sound bites.

00:49:11.000 There's no way you can extrapolate an idea properly.

00:49:15.000 There's no way you can understand truly what someone's thinking when you have five heads in a box all screaming over each other.

00:49:21.000 And that's all we were getting, especially out of cable news.

00:49:24.000 I thought, let me sit down with people.

00:49:26.000 Let me kind of tell them what I'm thinking, hear what they're thinking, and see what happens.

00:49:29.000 What happened, and I think the reason that I get so much hate, was my first show was in September of 2015, and it was as an interview show, The Rubin Report, and my first guest was Sam Harrison.

00:49:40.000 My whole goal was to clean up the mess that we discussed previously.

00:49:45.000 And I wanted to do it in a way where we could take like the eight things that he had been most maligned about and just put them into little five minute videos so that if he ever got attacked, he could just say, well, here's the answer.

00:49:55.000 Here's the real answer.

00:49:56.000 That's not really what I said.

00:49:57.000 And here's the real answer.

00:49:59.000 I did that.

00:50:00.000 And what I realized was after the two hour conversation, I walked, I was at Aura TV, which was Larry King's digital network at the time.

00:50:07.000 It was our first show there.

00:50:08.000 I wasn't planning on doing an interview show.

00:50:10.000 I was going to still do a sort of panel view style show that I was doing with the Young Turks.

00:50:14.000 But the second I was done, I was like, that felt real.

00:50:17.000 That felt important and valuable to me.

00:50:19.000 And I thought, that's what I want to do.

00:50:21.000 So we immediately flipped the format.

00:50:22.000 That's what we decided to do.

00:50:24.000 And what's interesting is from that conversation, it opened up doors to many people that were thinking the same things I was.

00:50:31.000 You know, people that were liberal in the truest sense of it.

00:50:34.000 And, you know, another great example is Majid Nawaz, who is a true liberal.

00:50:39.000 He is a classical liberal who is hated by the left and now sort of embraced by the right.

00:50:44.000 And there were just tons and tons of people that that experience kept happening.

00:50:48.000 but my feeling was whether I agreed with you or not, So like the first time that I had you on the show, which now feels like several lifetimes ago when we were back at Aura TV, we had never met before, you were just, to me, you were Ben Shapiro from Twitter, some guy from Twitter who, you know, is a conservative, he talks fast, I don't know, we'll see what happens.

00:51:06.000 We sat down, it was very obvious we had some disagreements, but the idea that I wouldn't have treated you respectfully, short of you not treating me respectfully, it's not what I grew up with.

00:51:17.000 And this, I think, is one of the things that I really learned from writing the book, Is that, you know, there's an old joke, if you have four Jews at a table, you have five opinions.

00:51:25.000 Because Jews, for the history of history, whether you come from, you know, rabbis debating, you know, the Talmud, to just the more Seinfeldization of Judaism, culturally, where it's just people talking everything out, that's kind of what Jews have. 0.97

00:51:41.000 It's like that, you know, there isn't a pope.

00:51:43.000 There isn't like the guy who tells everybody what they're supposed to think kind of thing.

00:51:48.000 There's more of we're all sort of thinking different things.

00:51:51.000 Some of us may be orthodox.

00:51:53.000 Some of us may be conservative.

00:51:54.000 Some of us may be reformed.

00:51:56.000 Some of us may be atheists, but still culturally Jewish, whatever.

00:51:59.000 And I know you have different feelings on all of those things.

00:52:01.000 But the combined feeling of all that is that debate was always healthy.

00:52:08.000 So at my family, at all the holidays, whether it was Passover, you know, a religious holiday, or whether it was Thanksgiving, a secular holiday, we would argue everything.

00:52:17.000 Anything you could think of would be argued about all night long at the dinner table.

00:52:22.000 And then dessert would be served and everybody was okay.

00:52:24.000 So I grew up with that feeling that you can argue things out.

00:52:28.000 I'm also from New York, you can argue things out and you don't punch each other.

00:52:31.000 I grew up in Long Island, I was born in Brooklyn but most of my formative adult years were in Manhattan.

00:52:38.000 And it's like in Manhattan you have all sorts of people doing all sorts of things and you can't run around punching everybody and calling everybody a racist and a bigot.

00:52:45.000 So to directly answer your question though, Every single interview that I've ever done, truly, I have never treated any of my guests any differently.

00:52:57.000 I have never tried to get anyone or undercut anyone.

00:53:00.000 I have genuinely been there to hear what they think.

00:53:02.000 I think that I've usually I'm sure not always, but usually ask the right questions.

00:53:08.000 Is it possible that now and again a follow-up that I should have got to, I missed?

00:53:14.000 Well, you're doing an interview show right now.

00:53:16.000 You know it's very possible.

00:53:17.000 Sometimes someone's very long-winded and you want to get back to something, but next thing you know it's six minutes later and then you just have to move on to something else.

00:53:24.000 So that's how I conduct my interviews.

00:53:26.000 I would say a good example of this in a way is when I had Marianne Williamson on, remember that hot month when she was gonna be the Democratic nominee?

00:53:35.000 I had her on and she's a collectivist.

00:53:37.000 She believes that white people are guilty for what they've done to black people. 0.98

00:53:42.000 This is a ridiculous concept to me because I'm not guilty for my father's sins. 0.89

00:53:47.000 Now, no one in my family owns slaves anyway, but I'm not guilty for anyone else's sins other than my own.

00:53:52.000 So collectivism as a rule Is an absurd ideology to me, but I didn't want to treat her ideas.

00:53:59.000 I didn't want to battle her the entire time.

00:54:01.000 I wanted to hear what she said.

00:54:02.000 The one thing that I did, which I think was appropriate, was about halfway through I said, Marianne, I just want to say one thing.

00:54:09.000 The lens through which you view the world is a collectivist lens.

00:54:13.000 And the lens which I view the world is an individualist lens.

00:54:15.000 That's a fundamental impasse that I just have to put out there so that we can now have a normal conversation.

00:54:21.000 Because otherwise I'm bringing people in here to browbeat them constantly and I'm just not that interested in that.

00:54:26.000 But I don't mind criticism.

00:54:28.000 I actually like criticism.

00:54:30.000 When it's healthy criticism, I like it actually.

00:54:32.000 That's how you get better.

00:54:33.000 So you mentioned in there religions.

00:54:36.000 I may as well ask you, you make some sort of religious overtures in the book that are interesting.

00:54:41.000 So where are you?

00:54:42.000 I told you when we first met that by the time we were done, I would have you observing Sabbath, like full on, not just a media break, like full on observing Sabbath.

00:54:49.000 So where are we in your journey and how am I doing?

00:54:51.000 Ben, I'm gonna have you baking gay cakes, so we'll see what happens here. 1.00

00:54:57.000 What I would say is this, and I do write about this in the book, that it has become fairly obvious to me over the last couple years, speaking to many of the people who you've talked to from Sam Harris and Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer and Jordan Peterson and the rest, that there has to be empirical truths outside of us that set order in the universe. 0.59

00:55:19.000 One of the reasons we're seeing such chaos out of the left is that secularism run rampant.

00:55:25.000 It gives you what the left is.

00:55:27.000 It gives you people with a completely competing set of ideas, often that have nothing to do with reality, just based on how they feel at any moment.

00:55:35.000 And the reason they're constantly destroying each other is because, well, okay, I feel $15 minimum wage is right, so I'm morally good.

00:55:42.000 Then the next person comes and says the $20 thing, and then they're morally good.

00:55:46.000 Now you gotta cut them down, and there's a million versions of this we could go through.

00:55:49.000 The founders of the United States talked about God-given rights.

00:55:54.000 The United States does not make me free.

00:55:57.000 I was born free.

00:55:59.000 You are born free as a human being, whether you want to call it a God-given right or it's your birthright as a human being.

00:56:05.000 The government can protect your rights.

00:56:07.000 It should protect your rights.

00:56:09.000 And it can take those rights away.

00:56:11.000 But it did not make me free.

00:56:13.000 And the real reason that I came around to this, which I know is very much in line with what you believe, and it's certainly in line with what Jordan believes, is that it's the only thing that over generations has allowed us to set some sort of order to the bad ideas of the day.

00:56:29.000 So when there's a certain set of crew, the liberals of today, let's say, who all believe it all happened at the Enlightenment.

00:56:36.000 And it's like, yeah, a lot of great ideas happened from the Enlightenment, right?

00:56:40.000 Free thought and open inquiry.

00:56:42.000 And a lot of the stuff that I talk about all the time about the individual, although you in your last book, you talk about how the roots of that also came from Greek culture and from Jerusalem.

00:56:52.000 But the point is that it took Churning of ideas for thousands of years to get to the Enlightenment strikes me as very thin.

00:57:03.000 And when we live in a time right now where postmodernism is so hot and the time-tested bad ideas of the past of socialism and communism somehow are becoming cool again, it seems to me that the secular world has no way of countering it.

00:57:18.000 That's why liberalism has been decimated by the progressives.

00:57:21.000 The progressives came in with a battering ram, and liberals are usually nice, and liberals say, oh, we're just tolerant, and yes, you can do whatever you want, and there's 80,000 genders, and I'm an oppressor because I'm white, and a series of crazy things.

00:57:36.000 They have no mechanism to stop it.

00:57:38.000 You know what the mechanism to stop it is?

00:57:41.000 It's actually what you guys have been preaching for a long time, and it took me a long time to get there, which is that there are empirical truths outside of us.

00:57:49.000 There is good and bad, and it's not because of us, it's because it exists.

00:57:53.000 And the best way, and this is really where I lay it in the book, The best way to explain that, that humans have, to me, seems to be the biblical stories.

00:58:03.000 There is a reason that I believe that Dave can beat Google, and it's because David beat Goliath.

00:58:11.000 Those stories have some meaning over time that will allow us to flourish as human beings.

00:58:17.000 And does that mean that you can be completely secular and atheist and totally moral?

00:58:22.000 Of course you can.

00:58:23.000 But I don't think a society can function on that over the long haul.

00:58:27.000 So, Dave, one of the other areas where I'm determined to move you is on the abortion issue.

00:58:31.000 You and I have debated this 35 times on your show.

00:58:33.000 And you've called yourself reluctantly pro-choice.

00:58:35.000 My goal is to make you more and more reluctant until the point where you are no longer pro-choice.

00:58:39.000 So how am I doing on that score right now?

00:58:42.000 All right, well, first off, wait, I didn't fully give you what you wanted on the other one.

00:58:47.000 David and I have been doing Shabbat pretty consistently these days, which I probably do it from more of a secular lens than you do it.

00:58:56.000 But I mean, we'll have some wine, we'll have some challah if we can get it.

00:59:00.000 It's often sold out here in Los Angeles.

00:59:02.000 There's a lot of Jews here.

00:59:04.000 But then also going on the idea of that it is the end of the week, it's the time to shut down, as we discussed earlier.

00:59:10.000 So that's like a secular lens on something that is timeless, which is consistent with everything else that I'm telling you here.

00:59:16.000 As for abortion, I mention our conversations in the chapter on abortion when the last time you and I sat here about abortion I was taking the 20 weeks thing and you said to me, well Dave If you're taking 20 weeks and my argument was, well, that's when they know that the fetus can feel pain.

00:59:32.000 Your argument was, well, Dave, if you're saying they can feel pain at 20, you do acknowledge it's a life at 19.

00:59:37.000 And I said, yes, Ben, actually, as a thinking person, I have to concede that.

00:59:42.000 I'm not debating it's not about life, but my But my position would be that if you care about individual rights, what you have to first care about is the woman who is here and now.

00:59:51.000 Now, to move my position to where I'm at in the book, I believe 12 weeks, which is the first trimester, that that's the cutoff.

00:59:58.000 Again, I want to say I do believe that basically the point of conception is life.

01:00:03.000 Now we can talk about the blastocysts at four days, and I happen to know a lot about this right now, because as you know, David and I just deposited sperm, and we're in the process of having kids of our own, so I'm well aware of all the stuff that goes with IVF, and when they talk about selective terminations, and all sorts of things, right?

01:00:20.000 without getting too into the weeds on all of that now, what I believe is, and I think this might be the place where the classical liberal lens and the conservative lens are just slightly different, which is that I want as much power to be given to that woman to make the right choice, as horrific a choice as it might be. 1.00

01:00:38.000 And I think a 12-week position is more than enough time.

01:00:42.000 The only thing I would say beyond that is that if there are really extenuating circumstances, if the child is gonna be unable to function or live any sort of fully actualized life, I think you can have some exceptions to that.

01:00:56.000 And the dirty secret for the conservatives here, of course, is that we do know that a lot of conservatives who say they are absolutely pro-life from the moment of conception, they know that there are circumstances, whether it's, you know, they find out about a genetic test or health of the wife, or a rape, or a series of other things, where they would do what they felt they had to do, but they publicly have another position.

01:01:17.000 I mean, I think most people know that.

01:01:19.000 It's sort of the thing we don't really talk about.

01:01:21.000 But I don't really take any pleasure in this topic.

01:01:24.000 But I would say this, I've moved in a certain way.

01:01:27.000 And as I always tell you on Twitter, I find, although I think your arguments and the arguments of other pro-life people like Lila Rose are quite compelling, I find it's the hysteria of the left that has actually moved me more on this.

01:01:42.000 Because when they are for eight-month abortions, and quite literally something called post-birth abortions, where you can get to discuss with your doctor what you want to do with the baby, that is a position that is impossible to hold.

01:01:54.000 And they make what I would say is any reasonable pro-choice position, even if you don't think it's reasonable, they make it very difficult to hold.

01:02:03.000 But the last line of the chapter, in effect, is saying, now that you all hate me, let's move on.

01:02:08.000 So, Dave, what's your media diet like these days?

01:02:11.000 Obviously, the media has fragmented in new ways.

01:02:13.000 People see this as the end of the world.

01:02:14.000 I obviously think that it's quite a good thing, because it used to be that we were all controlled by a certain number of key figures who would tell us what we needed to know.

01:02:23.000 And by the way, you've seen a lot of this with regard to coronavirus, which is kind of shocking to me, actually, is if you say, OK, listen, I'm perfectly willing to listen to the experts.

01:02:30.000 And then the experts are like, well, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty in these models.

01:02:33.000 You say, well, there's a lot of uncertainty in those models.

01:02:35.000 You want to get people out there back to work and you want everyone infecting each other.

01:02:39.000 It's like, whoa, hold up a second.

01:02:40.000 I just said exactly the same thing that Fauci and Birx are saying.

01:02:43.000 And when they say it, it's them being the experts.

01:02:45.000 When I just repeat back to them what they said, then it's me taking coronavirus lightly.

01:02:50.000 The narratives get set by the media.

01:02:51.000 And then if you violate the narrative in any way, it's, I mean, it's amazing.

01:02:55.000 I spent the last month Saying to one side, no guys, we should probably take this pretty seriously.

01:02:59.000 And to the other side, no, we should also take the economy pretty seriously because there's some difficult decisions that have to be made here and it's getting destroyed by everyone over it.

01:03:06.000 So never have I had less faith in the media to bring us any element of truth on this sort of stuff.

01:03:12.000 But where do you come down on, you know, you have a whole chapter in here about how to spot fake news.

01:03:16.000 What does your media diet consist of these days?

01:03:19.000 I mean, I assume you still read the New York Times, even though it's labeled both of us gateways to the Nazi party.

01:03:25.000 Yes, yes.

01:03:25.000 It's a seminal moment in my life when my dad went to get a bagel and coffee at the same place he does every Sunday for the last 40 years, and someone had to bring the New York Times up to him and say, oh, I didn't know David was the leader of the alt-right.

01:03:36.000 It was a really wonderful moment.

01:03:37.000 Well, I'll tell you this, just in the last couple of days, the New York Times did a story on misinformation in the age of coronavirus, and they talked about a tweet that went viral and a bunch of people we know, Steven Crowder and Brit Hume and a few other people tweeted this article.

01:03:53.000 The article was eventually taken down by Medium, not by the author who was analyzing data.

01:03:58.000 It was taken down by Medium.

01:03:59.000 And they talk about how this is misinformation because he wasn't being alarmist about coronavirus.

01:04:05.000 I happen to know the author, It's a guy by the name of Aaron Gin.

01:04:07.000 I think he's a decent fella.

01:04:09.000 I retweeted the article because I thought, you know, in a time when it's almost impossible to know who's telling the truth, I think it's important that we all hear different perspectives on things.

01:04:17.000 So they include me in this chart showing that when I tweeted it, it really started going viral and it's all about misinformation.

01:04:24.000 So I screenshot it and I put it up, and then I didn't even tag the author from the New York Times, because I don't even bother tagging these people anymore, because as you know, they're not journalists, they're quote unquote journalists.

01:04:35.000 I didn't even tag the guy, but he wrote back and said something like, we didn't quote mention you, you were just in a graph, but I'm glad you think you're flattered.

01:04:44.000 And I thought, you know, it's this exact type of glib doublespeak That is exactly, this is what I said to him on Twitter, I mean that you guys are destroying your own profession.

01:04:55.000 You're telling me when you put my name in a chart in an article about misinformation, that's not mentioning me.

01:05:01.000 It's not mentioning me.

01:05:02.000 And of course, if you Google the definition of the word mention, it qualifies as a mention.

01:05:06.000 But what's happening right now is all I ask, I tweet this all the time, all the media has to do, you want to shut up Ben Shapiro, you want to stop Scary Dave Rubin, you know what you do?

01:05:17.000 You start behaving honestly.

01:05:20.000 But they can't do it.

01:05:22.000 The ship has sailed.

01:05:24.000 The thing that is the New York Times is just the shell of the New York Times with a bunch of progressive activists underneath it.

01:05:33.000 I know someone that you know too that works at the New York Times who, although I don't think this person's talking to me anymore, would often tell me about how horrifically woke the, uh, entire newsroom had become and that there's nothing even remotely close to true coming out of that place.

01:05:49.000 They don't even have an, uh, uh, ombudsman, ombudsman.

01:05:52.000 Is that the word?

01:05:53.000 Yep.

01:05:53.000 Yeah.

01:05:54.000 They don't even, yeah, they don't even have an ombudsman anymore, which is the person who's supposed to be fact checking the fact checkers in You know, a public editor, they don't even have that anymore.

01:06:03.000 It is propaganda.

01:06:04.000 CNN is propaganda.

01:06:06.000 I'll give you a real good example of this.

01:06:08.000 In December, I'd missed you by a day, but we both spoke at the Turning Point Student Action Summit event in West Palm Beach.

01:06:14.000 And the day that I spoke, I spoke that morning, Trump spoke that afternoon, and I had never heard Trump speak in real time before, in real life.

01:06:21.000 And we're watching the speech, and I was actually in the second row.

01:06:24.000 And, you know, it's Trump.

01:06:25.000 He goes up there.

01:06:26.000 He's half stand-up comic.

01:06:27.000 He's, you know, he's getting the crowd going, the whole thing.

01:06:30.000 And then he says this thing about, and he gives an hour and a half speech, and it's half prompter, half off the cuff.

01:06:35.000 And he says this thing about wind power.

01:06:37.000 And he goes, you know, I love wind power.

01:06:39.000 Nobody knows more about wind power than me.

01:06:41.000 I've studied wind power my whole life.

01:06:43.000 And then he goes on and on about wind power back to the script.

01:06:45.000 But that line, obviously, those few lines were obviously improv.

01:06:49.000 And I turned to David, and I said, I bet you that within an hour, there's going to be an article about how Trump says he knows more about wind power than anybody.

01:06:58.000 And he's studied it his whole life.

01:06:59.000 And then voila, all the articles come out.

01:07:02.000 Donald Trump says he knows more about wind power than anyone. 1.00

01:07:06.000 And it's like, man, you idiots. 1.00

01:07:08.000 He was joking. 1.00

01:07:09.000 And then actually made some interesting points about the validity of wind power and how important it should be or should not be.

01:07:14.000 And then linked that also to failed other green projects that we've done, like Solyndra and a whole bunch of other stuff.

01:07:21.000 Anyway, so where do I get my diet from?

01:07:23.000 It's very difficult.

01:07:24.000 I think you guys at The Daily Wire are doing a nice job.

01:07:26.000 I think The Blaze is doing a nice job. 0.75

01:07:28.000 I do occasionally read some things out of The Times and The Washington Post, but they're pretty crappy.

01:07:33.000 I try to pay attention.

01:07:35.000 You know what I basically try to do is, on Twitter I follow a multitude of people from different perspectives, and I try to just whittle that into something that's true.

01:07:45.000 But I think one of the saving graces for me Um, which is why I don't envy the guys that have to do the grind every day, the hours and hours of content every day, is that it's really hard.

01:07:57.000 It's hard to, it's hard to distill truth out of this madness all the time.

01:08:03.000 And, uh, I think you do a pretty damn good job of it, but it is not easy to do.

01:08:08.000 And we, what I want to do is maybe take that information and then make it accessible for the people that, that don't have the time to be paying attention to this all day.

01:08:17.000 So Dave, I want to ask you a couple more questions.

01:08:19.000 I want to ask you what you got coming up for Rubin Report the rest of the year.

01:08:21.000 I also want to ask, I heard that you have a great meeting President Trump story that I definitely want to hear.

01:08:27.000 But if you actually want to hear Dave's answer to those questions, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and become a subscriber.

01:08:32.000 There's lots of great stuff happening for subscribers.

01:08:34.000 Become a subscriber right now and you hear the end of our conversation over there at dailywire.com.

01:08:38.000 Well, Dave, it's great to talk to you.

01:08:41.000 Congratulations on the book.

01:08:42.000 People are going to enjoy it.

01:08:43.000 Go check out Don't Burn This Book by Dave Rubin and stay safe out there or in there wherever we're at at this point.

01:08:49.000 Really appreciate it.

01:08:49.000 Good to talk to you, dude.

01:08:51.000 Thanks, Shapiro.

01:08:52.000 Good seeing you.

01:09:03.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

01:09:05.000 Associate producer, Katie Swinnerton.

01:09:07.000 Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.

01:09:09.000 Host production is supervised by Alex Zingaro.

01:09:11.000 Editing is by Jim Nickel.

01:09:13.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Coromino.

01:09:15.000 Hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.

01:09:16.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

01:09:18.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - April 26, 2020

Dave Rubin | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 92

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