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May 13, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
59:10
Dave Rubin | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 2
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- If you truly believe in freedom, not just 'cause you say you believe in freedom, but if you really want people to think for themselves, they're gonna start thinking some things you don't like.
So welcome.
I am here today with Dave Rubin, and we're going to jump in with Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report, one of, I would say, my best political friends out there and a real inspiration to a lot of folks who are trying to open their minds about politics.
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Okay, so I could not be more excited to welcome my friend Dave Rubin here.
Dave, good to see you.
Good to see you.
I like that line, if you die, it's too late.
It is.
That is how I live my life, basically.
I better get it done now because you never know.
Well, one of the great things about Dave Rubin is that the first time I was introduced to you, I think it was probably on your show.
I don't know if we knew each other before I was on your show.
And you are, I think, one of the best interviewers in the business.
So people normally see stuff like this and expect us to see the chairs reversed.
Yeah.
No question.
What's really fun about this, I actually want to ask you about your own journey because you don't actually get to talk about that too much on your show.
Very quickly, though, just for the record, clearly by you being an interviewer, you stole this from me.
I was the one that came up with the idea of the interview.
No question.
Two people sitting there talking it out.
It's full-on cultural appropriation.
That was me.
And you have culturally appropriated it from me.
I just want to put that.
Oh, yeah.
And then just like America, we're going to culturally appropriate from others and then we're going to make the best of it and make more monies.
So I mean, that's our actual plan.
Listen, if you make a better interview show than me, to me that truly, and I'm not kidding, that would be great because that would make me do better.
I love competition.
I'm not even saying we're in competition.
- I love that, that's the point.
This whole crew of people that I'm sure we're gonna talk about, we're all rising together despite what our differences are.
And that's awesome.
So it's like, I would love the idea of, oh Shapiro's doing a show and more of these guys are connecting and more of these ideas are going. - No, it's awesome. - It's awesome and that's why I'm here.
So, okay, before we get to, you know, what you referenced there, the so-called intellectual dark web, a term coined by our common friend, Eric Weinstein, I first want to ask you about your own personal journey toward being where you are.
Because if you look at your YouTube channel and you look at the videos that have the highest hit count, there's still some from your Young Turks days, you know, from the days when you were in league with our good friend, Shank Iger.
And so I want to ask you, sort of, for people who don't know about your journey from being pretty hard left to being open-minded about politics to the extent that you and I are probably much more in league together now than certainly you and Chank.
Well, especially on the big stuff.
On the big stuff, particularly.
Let's hear about how did you move from where you were to now where you are considering also the fact that you're openly gay, you're married to a dude.
How exactly how did this work?
I'm not just saying it.
I put it into practice in real life.
Yeah.
I mean, look, there's a lot there.
First off, I always find it funny.
And I just tweeted something about this that like people will look back on the way you thought a couple of years ago or saying you tweeted a couple of years ago or what you said a couple of years ago.
And then you see you say or do or think something different now and they think you're a flip flopper or you've sold out or some incarnation of that.
And I always think how ridiculous and sad, actually, that is.
The one thing that separates us from the animals is that we can think, we can learn, we can actually change our minds.
And I'm impressed when people go, you know, I used to think that way.
And now I think this way.
It doesn't mean you abandon your ideals, your morals, all the other stuff that I think we're going to talk about.
But it means that you can take new information in and change.
So without giving you the full long story of the full evolution, what I would say is when I was part of the Young Turks, a lot of it had to do solely on the gay marriage thing, that the left was pounding this issue.
A lot of it had to do solely on the gay marriage thing, that the left was pounding this issue.
And for me, all I've ever wanted is equal rights.
And for me, all I've ever wanted is equal rights.
I don't want special rights.
I don't want special rights.
I don't want anything extra.
I don't want anything extra.
I want equality of opportunity.
I want equality of opportunity.
And that's it.
And that's it.
And this one issue, which directly affected me personally, I think it did blur or color how I felt about some other things.
You know, like you, I was a political science major.
And it's funny.
I think back now and I'm like, man, knowing what I think now about politics and understand about freedom and the people that have influenced me and that I've been able to sit across and learn from, I don't know how I really thought that much, how I thought that the left really made sense, that the state really made sense, that collectivism how I thought that the left really made sense, that the state But I do think partly what happened was, at least for a couple of years, I was hijacked in a way.
My mind was hijacked by that one issue.
Yeah.
Because if you're not treated equally in some way, then that can become something that colors everything else.
So it's not totally about that.
But I think that was a large part of it.
And then, look, gay people are equal now.
Everyone in this country is equal.
I mean, that's the truth.
There are no laws on the books right now that cause inequality.
That doesn't mean inequality doesn't exist, that we don't live in a utopia.
And thank God we don't live in a utopia, by the way, because it's not real.
And on the way to utopia, you get dystopia.
And I think that we might be heading there right now, but we're trying to fight it, right?
So I would say, basically, once I woke up and I started really seeing what the left was and endless hysteria that you know all about and attacking people's motives constantly, lying, smearing, basically turning on Fox News and going, that's what they're doing and we're going to do the reverse.
That's not a position to hold.
A position to hold is something that you truly believe in and understand where rights and morals and all the rest of it comes from.
And I would say more than anything else, my real evolution is because I do this.
I mean, every week I sit down with people from you to Jordan Peterson, to Sam Harris, to Thomas Sowell, and an incredible array of thinkers.
And I swear to you, Ben, I sit there, I look at them as you're looking at me now, and I try to take in as much as I can and be as honest as possible.
And I can see right now, you don't have a ton of notes on you.
We talked a little bit before and we're going to do our thing.
And that's how I try to approach an interview.
I don't have a motive.
I try to honestly hear these people.
And sometimes you can figure it out when someone doesn't know what they're talking about, but let them say it and let the audience decide.
So I want to talk about your interview style in just a second, because there's been some controversy associated with some of the folks that you interview.
But I think that, you know, of all the people that you're talking about, the one thing that I've said that I think that all these folks have in common is that they actually like examining ideas and we're not ripping on each other's motives.
We're not constantly suggesting that we're coming from a bad place, trying to do bad things.
And that more than anything is, I think, what unifies this group of people.
That and the fact that there are a lot of people out there who cut against their prevailing audiences to say particular things.
Absolutely.
I mean, think about this.
I take positions that... I mean, we did it on my show just a couple of months ago, right?
You know I'm pro-choice, begrudgingly pro-choice, and I talk about the 20-week thing, and you made an interesting argument where you said, you know, if you're saying it's a life at 20 weeks, but, you know, it can feel pain.
That's my argument.
Well, I conceded to you, yes, it is obviously a life at 18 weeks.
It's one of those issues that whether we agree or disagree, we should be doing that.
We should be having that argument.
And I think out of this whole crew of people, whether it's Eric or his brother Brett Weinstein or Christina Hoff Summers or Sam Harris or whoever it is, we're all taking some unpopular positions that go against what our base, if you want to call it, believes.
That shows a little bit of character.
That shows a little bit of a desire for truth.
And that's all we're trying to do here.
And really, to your point, though, I think, how often do any of us really attack people?
Now, look, me and you are big on Twitter, and we fight with specific people now and again.
Going out of your way to attack somebody for who they are is something that I don't think any of us do.
None of us do it.
And have we ever done it and slipped up and you can word thing a certain way or whatever?
Yes, of course.
But if you really look at the breadth of work of these people and all the times we've come together and now a bunch of us are doing public events and all that, we consistently are talking about ideas.
We are not talking about people.
And that simply does not happen with most of what's going on with the left these days.
They attack motives.
They attack your human, the most inner part of you.
And that's what they go for.
And it's because they've grown fat.
They've controlled the narrative for so long that they don't want to debate ideas because they felt that they didn't have to for so long.
And that's why I think so many of them hate me, actually.
It's not that they think I'm necessarily wrong.
It's that I know what that is.
I was in it.
So they can go, it's like it's easy for them to hate you.
Like, it's easy for them to hate Glenn Beck, it's easy for them to hate Prager and all that, because, like, we've always hated the conservatives.
But wait, here's one of us.
Right.
And not only that, I mean, they look at folks like you and they say, OK, here's a gay guy who's not towing the party line.
Well, that means that he must not legitimately be gay.
I mean, secretly, he must be subscribing to Playboy or something.
Pretty gay, man.
I don't want to make you blush right now, but I assure you that I'm gay.
I mean, it just, but even that, it doesn't matter.
We can talk about that if you want, but it's just, to me, it's so irrelevant.
No, but it's the tokenism of the left, right?
Yeah, it's the tokenism.
And this is one thing that does bother me on both sides, is the sort of tokenism that adheres to both sides.
So on the one side, you'll see from the left, this idea that if you are gay, then you cannot be conservative.
Or as you saw with Kanye West, if you're legitimately black or you care about black folks, then you can't actually be a fan of President Trump.
You can't be an independent thinker in any way.
And then I do think that there are some folks on the right, and there's a question about the right too, which they'll look at somebody like you or like a Kanye, and instead of saying, okay, that's an individual who agrees with me, that's really awesome, they'll say, ooh, look, a gay guy agrees with me.
Yes.
And all of a sudden it's like, ooh, totally different.
Whereas I think the proper response to that is, okay, so he's gay, you know, whatever.
Like, we agree, that's the important thing, right?
Yeah, I mean, look, this is where nobody's fully right all the time.
You know what I mean?
Like we all have our internal biases.
We all are constantly trying to figure it out.
If you're an honest thinker, you're trying to figure out what's going on.
So yes, to both sides kind of pick and choose when they want to play identity politics and all that.
For me, as someone that came from the left, I know it so well, that line of thinking.
And it basically spread like a virus throughout all of the left.
If you look at my show, like the first time I had you on, which was almost three years ago already.
And again, we did not know each other.
And I think you came in very ready to fight.
Like you were like, oh, I'm sitting down with a lefty.
You were ready to fight.
And I really was there like, you know, this guy, yeah, let's do it.
And look what's happened in these last couple of years where we've become allies in this space.
So people say to me, well, you don't attack the right enough.
Now, first off, By and large, I've been welcomed for all of my differences.
I go to events that you've been to.
I go to the Turning Point event that we did in West Palm Beach.
It was the biggest college conservative gathering I think ever, basically.
I went up there.
I talked about being gay, married and pro-choice and for euthanasia and a whole bunch of things that are completely.
Right.
You live with your chin.
Yeah.
I got up there.
Yeah.
And guess what?
I got a standing ovation.
Not the Shapiro level ovation, but I got a pretty good.
It's a different thing with you.
But that's the point.
So you cannot tell me that these people are the intolerant ones because I constantly see the reverse of that.
And all I see is intolerance from the left.
But they are, you guys genuinely are the tolerant ones And the left, this thing that I was talking about, has taken over everywhere.
I mean, from top down, from Bernie to the Women's March and however low level you want to go.
Does that not mean that, of course, there are decent lefties?
I think there's a lot of misguided people.
But I don't believe these are all bad people.
What I do believe is that we can show them that, actually, if you really care about live and let live, if you really care about Gay people are black, people are Muslim, people are the rest.
The only way to do that is let people live free.
And how do you do that?
It's through libertarian.
And this is the part, this is the place where there really is a crossover because whether you're a conservative libertarian or a left-leaning libertarian, libertarianism, I think, is probably the wave of the future in the sense that people want to leave each other alone for the most part.
Like that's why abortion is such a big disagreement because there are left-leaning libertarians who say, well, that's a woman's choice and right-leaning libertarians like me who say, well, that's an independent human child.
And so this implicates actual liberty issues.
But it's why, for example, you start off by saying that you were really on the left because of the gay marriage issue.
You know, I've been in favor of the government getting out of the business of marriage for years and years and years and years.
Before Obama was in favor of same-sex marriage, I was in favor of the government getting out of the business of marriage, even though as a religious person, and you know this because we've discussed this, as a religious person, I still think homosexual activity is a sin, We live in a free country.
You can believe that I'm an idiot, right?
Let's not gloss over that point.
I really mean this.
I really want to focus in with you here.
I genuinely don't care.
I mean, I really mean that.
Like, I hope, look, hopefully Ben will be friends for another 50 years and we'll change the world.
And hopefully we'll live long enough, but we'll change the world to be a freer place and all that.
And maybe when we're 80, we'll do this again.
And he'll go, you know, Dave, after all these years, maybe, maybe you're not a sinner.
It doesn't even, and I don't even think you really view me that way.
And it truly doesn't matter to me as long as you're not coming onto my property and trying to harm me or anything.
And people really need to understand that.
And people need to understand that I think in general about religious folks is that just because religious people think something is a sin doesn't mean they think the government should get involved or that it's my job to lecture to you about the sort of sin in which you are participating, particularly if this is something that you're involved in or you're set on.
There's actual counterproductive things that are being done.
Yeah.
This, though, is where I think the conservatives got a little crossed up with the religious crew and for years was doing too much moralizing and preaching.
And, for example, so for the years before gay marriage became law, I believe that you were taking the libertarian position on this.
Yeah.
The government shouldn't be involved.
But very few conservatives were doing it.
Like Rand Paul, for example, should have been screaming about that.
Yeah.
Right.
He should have said this has like I'm the libertarian of you guys.
Right.
Conservatives and Republicans.
That should have been his mantle.
Not because he really I don't care what he thinks about gay marriage one way or another.
But he should have stayed out that position and he could have led the conservatives to a more principled position.
But but he didn't because everyone's always playing politics in their own little thing.
But at the end of the day, if you guess what?
It's the law of the land right now.
And also, I mean, this is the case that I make to religious people.
If you're a religious-leaning libertarian, right, who believes that certain things are sins, so what?
Meaning that here's the real problem.
Don't do them.
Right, exactly.
Ben, don't sleep with a dude.
Done.
We're there.
Yeah, I mean, we're good to go, but that's the point.
Right, exactly.
And I think one of the things that I've made the case to with religious people is if you're a religious person and you don't want the government cracking down on you from the reverse side, if you don't want the state of California saying same-sex marriage is now the law of the land and your church has to perform same-sex marriages, well then you should be in favor of the government getting entirely out of this business.
Because whatever the government touches, it now has the power to wield the gun on behalf of So in a second, I want to ask you more about your interview style, which has become super popular, obviously, and in some ways controversial.
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Okay, so let's talk about the popularity of your show, because obviously you went from nothing to a million miles an hour very quickly.
I mean, you have an enormous audience now.
Huge numbers of people tune into your show.
I know that the interview that you and I, it was really more of a conversation.
That's what's great about your show, is it's not even an interview so much as it is a conversation with the person that you're talking about.
Which is great.
And the interview that you and Jordan and I did together has, you were saying, 3 million views on YouTube now.
So you guys have become wildly popular.
So the area where you're getting criticized a lot from some folks is that you'll have not only a wide variety of people on, but people who they consider outside the Overton window.
And I want to talk in a minute about kind of the constriction of the Overton window and how dangerous this is.
Sure.
But what's your philosophy when you decide how to have a guest?
Who do you think it's worth sitting across from?
Because obviously not all ideas are created equally valuable.
And who do you think, OK, I'm not having that dude on.
That guy's just a jackass.
Yeah.
So it's a great question.
I'm glad you asked it.
And I've been trying to address this, but hopefully this will be the cleanest one that I can do.
So my general belief is if you are saying something that is relevant and it's starting to percolate up and I start seeing, oh, there's people talking about you, this idea is sort of interesting, this or that.
It's just a little bit of just like a general gestalt of things, like I just start feeling something.
And suddenly I get a burst of people saying, you gotta look this way, look this way, look this way.
So that's usually where it starts.
Look, there are cases, so for example, Mike Cernovich is a good example of this.
When I had Mike Cernovich on, it was about, Two years ago or so, it was right at the beginning of the Trump thing.
And on Twitter, I'm seeing all these people that are these big MAGA Trump people, but they were all anonymous, and I couldn't find anyone that was like a somewhat legit human, like a published author or a television, like an actual face.
I couldn't find anybody.
And then suddenly, Cernovich started popping up more and more, and I looked, and he had this book, and I was like, all right, he's a published author, seems kind of interesting.
I think he was verified on Twitter, so I was like, alright, there's something here.
And then I interviewed him.
By the way, in my interview, we talked Trump, basically, for an hour.
We talked some frustrations with the left, and just blah blah blah.
There was nothing that was racist that I could figure out.
It wasn't about Pizzagate?
No, it was before Pizzagate, by the way.
So this is also a funny thing, where you interview someone, then someone does something a year later, and then people think, How could you have interviewed that person?
Yeah, or they'll literally tweet the interview to me and say, you didn't ask about Pizzagate.
And I'm like, I don't have a freaking time machine.
You know what I mean?
But really, everyone just wants to get you all the time and all that stuff.
Now look, has Cernovich done some things that I think are somewhat shady like Pizzagate?
Yes.
At the same time in the last year or so, has he done some interesting actual reporting?
Yes.
And at the same time, has the media absolutely collapsed and become a completely unethical cesspool of evil?
Yes.
And I don't consider him to be the worst part of that cesspool.
So I have no problem doing that interview when you, especially when you take the context of everything else.
I think the one that people seem to be more annoyed about.
So, so realistically, look, I've done, I don't know, 300, 400 interviews.
Yeah.
So people point to like two or three and I'm like, all right, that's always the way it was.
All right.
Two or three.
So I think, uh, look, people were upset when I had Milo on.
I do not regret having Milo on.
He was a big personality at the time.
Yes.
He was a cultural phenomenon for good or bad.
And look, where is Milo now?
You know, pretty much irrelevant.
- It comes out in the wash, yeah.
- Yeah, so I don't, but I have no regrets for anything that I did with him.
I think we had, especially the second interview with, we talked, it was two gay people that had really wildly different takes on things, really going into some issues that don't get discussed that often.
I have no regrets. - And that one was good also because it was clarifying.
I mean, there were certain things that he said.
I mean, I remember writing a column about something that he said about, you know, the value of political correctness and saying, OK, well, if this is what he thinks, here's why he's wrong.
And clarification is a useful, a useful tool for sure.
I mean, people like, obviously, it's well publicized that Milo and I do not get along.
Yeah.
And our not getting along began long before the actual, you know, the actual move by the alt-right, you know, involved with Milo.
It started off when Milo was saying that political correctness had to be combated by saying things that were utterly vile.
Yeah, and I'm glad you said that because that gets to a little bit of why I interview the way I do.
I wrote a long column about this for Daily Wire on your show, right?
Because you had that conversation with him.
Yeah.
And I'm glad you said that because that gets to a little bit of why I interview the way I do.
The only way I could get him to that place, right, was if I let him speak.
Not if I just browbeat him the second he said something that I disagree with or I found But you got to let him speak and then smart people will look at it and then hopefully write an article about it and say, OK, this is what's wrong about this or or that or the other thing.
I think the one, though, that that people seem to latch on to the most is when I had Stefan Molyneux, who's a YouTuber.
He's really interested in this race and IQ stuff.
Look, a lot of people wanted me to have him on.
I had done his show once or twice where we basically, it was unedited, I made sure it was unedited, and I basically talked about classical liberalism.
I talked about the individual and limited government and all that, and we had a perfectly fine exchange.
Do I know every bit of this guy's work?
No.
If you were to add up all of the time that I've ever watched of all of his videos, I don't even think you'd get to an hour.
And it's probably significantly less than that.
The obsession with race and IQ is odd to me.
It's an extremely uncomfortable topic.
I mean, look what just happened with Sam Harris and Ezra Klein because of the Charles Murray interview.
Sam being completely right and Ezra being completely wrong, of course.
Yeah, and that's a whole other thing.
And it also goes to show why the media is just so awful once they get infected by social justice.
Because Ezra and Vox have just been completely How the hell did I end up on the same side as Sam Harris, man?
I mean, like, this is what's happened now.
But, you know, almost every speech that I give now, I give a shout out to you and to Sam because I always say, this is the incredible time we're living in.
The first video that I did of 2018, this is going to be the year of unusual alliances.
You and Sam Harris disagree on everything, literally on everything, from the most existential questions of the universe and God and meaning and all of that, to taxes, to abortion, to da-da-da-da.
Yet you're allies.
This is a beautiful thing.
And that's and that's why people are coming to us, by the way.
Real quick, though, on.
Yeah.
Look, he has an obsession with that topic.
I even I made a point of repeatedly asking him in the interview, why do you care about it so much?
Why do you care?
Now, at the end of the day, we link to some articles that he referenced down below.
And then I put it out there for people to decide what they think.
It's not my thing.
But the last thing I would say about this, because I don't think it's worth belaboring too long, is that, you know, my friend and mentor Larry King, you know, in his in his heyday, picture in 1980, He looks exactly the same as you did that day.
And I love Larry.
The fact that he even thinks I'm remotely decent at doing this is the most incredible thing ever.
But peak Larry King.
Back in the days when he was introducing me at the Israeli Bonds Banquet.
Yeah, exactly.
Playing the violin.
Let's go 94, peak of O.J.
Simpson, Larry King.
On any given week, Larry King, five nights a week on CNN, could have had the cast of Friends on Monday, Farrakhan on Tuesday, David Duke on Wednesday, an animal guy on Thursday, and, you know, Lucille Ball at 80 years old on Friday.
No one in their right mind would have thought he endorsed all those ideas, or he thought all those people were friends, or whatever.
For some reason now, if you sit with someone, if you chat with someone, if you just listen to someone, you automatically endorse their ideas.
It's such a dangerous, slippery slope, Pat.
And I believe you just have to let it be.
If people don't like what I do, you don't have to watch.
So here's the obvious follow-up question, just to clarify.
So are there people who you wouldn't have on?
Well of course there's people I wouldn't have on.
I'm talking about people in the conversations.
Let's say Richard Spencer wanted to come on your show.
Would you have Richard Spencer on?
Because obviously he's prominent.
So I'm glad you asked that one.
He's actually not that prominent anymore.
And who made him prominent, by the way?
It was the left that kept propping him up as if he was somehow the standard bearer for conservatism or for the right or something like that.
There were very few good, decent conservatives, which I think is the bulk of conservatives, that were like, this guy's on it.
Like, these are the ideas we're pushing.
So as for Spencer, look, his ideas that the United States should be a white ethnostate or a whatever you want to call that, those are so absolutely ridiculously counter to all of our founding documents, to everything that is great about this country, those are so absolutely ridiculously counter to all of our founding documents, to everything that is great about this country, that Now, could someone say, Dave, you just said this thing about Molyneux.
You gave him air?
Possibly.
Like I'm willing to entertain that.
And if at the end of this you say, you know, Dave, you really did drop the ball on that one.
All right.
You know what?
You're not gonna believe this, but I'm not perfect.
It's crazy, right?
So I would say that those ideas are so ridiculous, but it's not just that they're ridiculous.
Those ideas are so out of power in any way.
You can say whatever you want about Trump and whatever, but he's not a white nationalist.
He's not a white supremacist.
The ideas of white supremacy don't have power in mainstream media.
They don't have power in the halls of politics or any of those things.
So to focus on that would just be giving it strength.
When I talk about what's wrong with the left, it has infected the whole freaking thing from top to bottom, as I said earlier.
So that's why I focus on that more.
But of course, if you are literally calling for murdering people and all, I have no need to talk to you.
And by the way, my show, as you know, my studio is in my home.
There are some people I don't want in my home.
Well, I think that's a pretty good rule of thumb.
If you don't want them in your home, then you probably shouldn't have them on your interview, right?
We've had that debate internally about some things.
Have you found it harder since you've made this shift?
You're very open with the number of people and the kinds of people you interview.
As you say, you've had people left and right.
Have you found it harder to book particular guests because of your reputation?
Meaning, was it easier to book people from the left before and now you find that they're avoiding your calls?
Well, it's funny because people say, oh, you have all these libertarians on.
That's usually all these.
Well, they always call them far right.
They're just basically libertarians.
And it's like, man, if you think Shapiro and Prager and the rest of these guys and Larry Elder are far right, whatever you mean by that, like you actually don't want to have a conversation.
You know, you truly don't.
Look, most of my guests, I think, actually have leaned a little bit left.
But they've all been purged from the left.
That's what's consistently happened.
So let's talk about that, because I wrote a column recently about the reduction of the Overton window.
I was talking specifically about Kevin Williamson at National Review and the Atlantic hiring him and then firing him within three weeks when they found a tweet they didn't like.
And what the left, it seems to me, has done, and this is why you and I are now in the same camp, and Sam and I are now in the same camp, we're all in the same camp together, is what the left has done is they've created, the Overton window, for people who don't know, is this term that was coined for acceptable elements of debate.
So not people you agree with, but people who are saying things that are inside the realm of the rational or inside the realm of the reasonable or the decent, let's say.
And what the left has done is they've closed that window so tight that unless you agree with them on virtually everything, you are now no longer in the Overton windows.
So for Sam, he gets cast out of the Overton window for saying on national TV that Islam is a more dangerous religion than Christianity, because he's looking at the numbers of adherents who are actually violent.
And Ben Affleck calls him crazy, and suddenly Sam's outside the Overton window, and he does an interview with Charles Murray, and suddenly Ezra Klein is calling Sam Harris a racist for talking about obviously well-substantiated IQ studies in a rational, reasonable way, in which he's not saying that all IQ differences are biological, and he's still getting cast outside the Overton window.
So do you think that there's a way to open back up the Overton window?
Or is the only way to do this just by changing the gatekeepers of the Overton window?
Or does it need to be destroyed altogether?
Because there are a lot of people who are saying, well, it seems like there's three perspectives.
One, the Overton window is too small and needs to be broadened a little bit.
One is we need to change who gets to decide who's in the Overton window.
And the third is no Overton window whatsoever.
Everybody gets to talk.
Every perspective is, to a certain extent, equivalent in terms of what should be heard and what should not.
Where do you stand on that?
So it's a great question.
I just did a video a couple days ago where I said the Overton window hasn't just shifted, it's shattered because that's what that's what's happened right now.
You're right.
The left controlled the narrative for so long that if you if you were a lefty who dare say some unpopular things, and Sam really is the best example of this, you will be purged.
Who hates Bill Maher now?
Is it the right?
Is it Ben Shapiro?
I'm quoting him on my show now.
Yeah, even though you disagree with probably all of his, all of his policy solutions are probably the complete reverse.
And his stakes on religion are wildly... Oh, right, all that religion thing.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, like the thing about me being crazy for everything on my head, yeah, all that, yeah.
Okay, but, but, right, but yet you're quoting him all the time.
Right.
Because your basic premise of where you guys are starting from is, because Bill really is a libertarian, but he's gotten sort of lost, I think, in some leftist stuff.
And by the way, I would love to have this conversation with him at some point.
Oh yeah, because he called himself libertarian.
I would love you to have this conversation.
Oh, it would be great, because he called himself libertarian, then he moved to the left while still calling himself libertarian, and now he's finding that he actually is still libertarian in his mind, even though he'd moved to the left.
But his audience is left now, so he's trapped.
The best thing is him yelling at his own audience on his show.
It's an incredible thing.
So it's funny, so for all the... What happens with Bill now?
He says some unpopular thing and then the left now calls him racist and a bigot, but that's the same thing he was doing to conservatives all those years.
So he's become sort of a victim of his own creation.
But putting him aside for a second on the over-the-window question, Look, it needed to be bigger.
There is no doubt about that.
It needed to be broadened so we could have some honest conversations.
But we simply could not, so that every time a decent conservative spoke up, you were labeled far-right and alt-right and everything else.
Look, even with the Kanye tweets, what happens?
He sends out a couple videos of Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator, best-selling author, BuzzFeed, Mediite, a bunch of others.
They all wrote that Scott Adams is far right.
Candace, I mean, the Twitter Moments thing happened when Candace Owens, when Kanye tweeted about Candace Owens.
Twitter Moments, the lead thing.
Far right Candace Owens.
Candace is a friend of mine.
I've had her on the show.
I have a lot of differences with her, which, by the way, we talk about publicly.
I was at Berkeley with her a couple weeks ago.
I'm going to be with her next week doing something.
The idea that she's far right.
You may not like her.
But this is what they do.
So the window did need to expand.
If it shatters, if it truly shatters, well then we're in this odd place where everything is equal and everything should be entertained and that could be dangerous.
But as a free speech guy, I'm all for those things being said.
Right, if you have to have a choice between there being no Overton window and an Overton window that's this small.
Yeah, look, for people like us that take on popular positions and say what we think all the time, we need that Overton window to be as wide as possible.
But that's the risk of freedom.
I mean, this is the risk consistently if you truly believe in freedom, not just because you say you believe in freedom.
But if you really want people to think for themselves, they're going to start thinking some things you don't like.
But then what's the answer?
Get people to be educated.
Get them to read some stuff.
Get them to listen to some interesting podcasts.
You know, Greg Gutfeld, who I think is doing a great job of bouncing between mainstream media on Fox News and kind of getting this intellectual dark web thing.
He wrote a great piece on how, you know, you barely have to go to college at this point because you can go on YouTube and listen to lectures by Jordan Peterson and Kristina Sommers and Gad Saad and a whole bunch of other people.
You'll learn.
I think there's some issues with that because you need college, I think, for some of the socialization and, you know, fun and some other stuff.
Didn't work for me.
I lived at home, so I'm so unsocialized.
I'm working on, you know.
Yeah, exactly.
You're taking me to the parties.
Yeah, that's why I'm You know, that's why I've got you doing videos with with Blair White.
But really, I mean, even that the fact that we had that conversation about trans issues, and that you, you admitted that you had to sort of public position and a private position on this.
And then you had the conversation with Blair.
And now I've still got these crazy people on Twitter telling me what a homophobe you are.
Yeah.
And that's why they need to be ignored.
We don't need to give them oxygen.
If you truly want to make a better world, if you truly want to live in a country with 300 some odd million people that are all going to have differences of opinion, and that's actually what makes us stronger, then those people just have to be ignored.
And they're running out of steam, by the way.
So I want to talk about the technological reduction of the Overton window.
We'll talk about YouTube and Facebook and what they're doing over there in just a second.
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Okay, so...
David, you've had some bad experiences with YouTube.
YouTube has been constantly demonetizing your videos, which obviously has to cripple your income, considering that you're largely a YouTube-based platform.
You're moving into new areas of revenue, which I'm really excited about for you, because I think it'll just expand your capacity to do all the things you're already doing, which is awesome.
What we've seen is that, and I've been talking openly about this with members of Congress, what we've seen is that there were these gatekeepers to the media, and it used to be NBC, ABC, CBS, and then the internet destroyed all of that, and you could get information from wherever you wanted, and then there were these new platforms, Facebook, and YouTube, and Twitter, and they said, you know what?
We're just platforms.
We're places where you can gather your audience and expand your audience, and you don't have to worry about us shutting it down, because we're not ABC, NBC, CBS.
We don't have an editorial board that decides what people can see and what people can't see.
And then they lied.
It turns out that they are all activist publishers and they are shadow banning or they are demonetizing.
So you've had videos with me that have been demonetized.
You had a video with Thomas Sowell.
I can't make a dime off you, Shapiro.
Right, exactly.
I don't know why I'm making a dime off of you.
So we figured it out.
This is the whole cultural appropriation thing that we were talking about.
But, you know, with the orthodoxy comes greater earning power.
So I'll bring you back eventually.
That's what you really judge before the secular Jew thing.
We should talk about that.
Okay, we'll talk about that in just a second.
But how have you been dealing with that?
And what do you think is the solution?
Because there's some people saying, you know, regulate YouTube as a public utility.
I'm always troubled by the idea of additional regulation in this space.
Do you think it's possible to build a competitor or something like a YouTube or Facebook, considering the market share dominance that these companies actually have?
What do we do about this?
Because again, you had a conversation with Thomas Sowell that was automatically demonetized with Thomas Sowell.
I don't even know how that's humanly possible.
Ben, as a guy in a yarmulke, you know the story of David versus Goliath.
I've sort of become Dave versus YouTube.
I mean, I've been one of the most outspoken people on this because it's impossible to tell what's going on.
If, let's say they just had a clear one pager, this is what we monetize, this is what we don't, this is our policy.
Well, nobody forced me to be on YouTube.
I'm voluntarily there.
They don't have to monetize anything, by the way.
I truly, I mean, I tweet this all the time.
They can do whatever they want.
The only reason I'm screaming about it all the time is I can only use my voice to influence things.
I don't want government involvement.
The idea that the government, that the United States government is going to somehow regulate a tech company properly is bananas.
First of all, those guys don't even know what a computer is.
I mean, if you watch that hearing with Zuckerberg, it was just like, what is the Facebook?
Is it a book full of faces?
Ben, I just paid my property taxes a month ago on a government website.
It looked like it was AOL from 1996.
The idea that these people can do this, or that middle management regulators can figure out... What makes you hate taxes even more?
Because they take all your money and then they build these crappy websites.
The hour that I lost in my life just watching the thing slowly.
Yeah, I mean, I was really just like dial-up prodigy, like ridiculous.
So the idea that the government could do it is not the answer to me.
What I think we can do, and I think you're doing it too, is we can influence them by leveraging our audience to know what's going on.
It's the lack of transparency that's the problem.
And it's also, look, the only reason I keep making such a big noise about it is because things like Thomas Sowell, things like Ben Shapiro.
I mean, it's all over the board.
And by the way, you know, there's this idea out there that this is only they're only attacking conservatives or they're only attacking people that are thought of as more right or whatever I am or whatever.
I don't know that that's the case.
I genuinely have no idea what's going on, but I will consistently use my voice because that's what you're supposed to do as a citizen.
I'm not asking the government.
And yes, do I think competition can come in?
Yes.
Now, the one counter argument to this, and I think it's a legit one, and I think perhaps our friends at Prager University view this a little differently than us, is that Google, which owns YouTube obviously, controls so much information, has so much power now, that it is possible that by Default.
That competition can never really arise against them.
Now, I actually don't take that position, but I think there's an interesting argument to be had there.
I believe they'll ultimately crumble under the weight of their own nonsense.
If you're going to say, well, and we know this because of the DeMora lawsuit, well, we're not going to hire white or Asian engineers.
Guess what?
You're going to start getting not the best engineers.
And that's not a knock on anyone's ethnicity or anything, but you should be hiring... If your only standard is merit, it's different than if that is not your only standard, obviously.
Precisely.
So they will crumble on their own.
And if we have to push them a little bit so that ultimately something else can arise, then so be it.
But I would be, look, if tomorrow it all gets fixed, every time I email them, I'm like, guys, I want this to work.
You think I'm enjoying this?
I assure you, every time we see the demonetized thing and we request a view and one of my guys tells me, I mean, I'm not going to repeat, because I know this is a family show, what I usually say at first.
But then I'm like, I mean, I got to do it again.
And then I got to take the screenshot and I got to tweet.
It's like, this is not what I want to put out a show.
Get people to check it out.
Let the ideas fall where they may and then move on.
But no, I don't think the government is the answer.
And I think what you're doing, what I'm doing, what Phil DeFranco is doing and Rogan and the rest is the answer.
Keep putting out good stuff and force them to do the right thing.
Now, the one area where I'd be curious to get your thoughts is what I've suggested is if they're going to be acting like publishers, then they ought to be treated like publishers.
Meaning we here at The Daily Wire, if I publish a story that is libelous, then The Daily Wire can be sued for that because we control the flow of information.
If you're Facebook and you are taking certain content and you are whitewashing it or you're moving it off the front pages and you're taking other content, you're elevating that.
It seems to me that unless you're doing that in the most neutral possible way, you are now a publisher.
You're deciding what goes up and what goes down.
And Zuckerberg himself said we're now responsible for what goes up.
Well, obviously he doesn't mean that because if he means that, they will be out of business within five minutes just for simple copyright violation.
I mean, there's probably tens of thousands of copyright violations that happen on Facebook every single day with people grabbing other people's photos and sticking them on Facebook.
My feeling is that if they're going to act like publishers, they've got to be treated like publishers.
And if they want to act like platforms, like an AT&T phone line, then act like an AT&T phone line.
Don't tell me that you're acting like an AT&T phone line while you're demonetizing Dave Rubin while actually spending money to promote Shank.
Right, so of course.
So I read your piece on that and I think it's a perfectly sound argument.
I'm still worried, even granting you all of that, I'm still worried about where that would lead if they were to be viewed as a publisher instead because it still creates a problem with the government and I just don't think the government can solve this thing.
I think competition is the only thing they can.
But very quickly on that, we know that they have partners.
I mean, with the groups that they've decided that are monitoring content, they're all far left groups.
The channels that they whitelist, like the Young Turks, I mean, the Young Turks is a far left By every estimation, they're a far-left news organization.
Now, because the media never calls anything far-left, they just call anything far-right.
Bernie Sanders is mainstream-left.
Right, exactly.
Bernie is far-left.
I mean, that is the truth, but they never call him far-left.
He's a hero, and you're far-right.
So, again, I mean, that gets us back to the Overton window thing, but I would say competition is the answer, and we just have to keep putting out good stuff, and we will survive.
I mean, this is exactly why I'm on Patreon, because YouTube Rev, it just makes no sense, And, you know, I'm working on some other things, partly because you hooked me up with something, and we'll go from there.
I can survive.
I can survive.
Oh, no, you're doing great.
And the fact that your audience continues to grow is presenting a real threat to a lot of these outlets because, again, if they don't get to choose which outlets have the viewers, the money will find the viewers.
I mean, that's just the way advertising works.
So eventually they're going to look and they're going to say, Dave Rubin has enormous numbers.
And whether we get you the money another way or whether we get you money through YouTube, the money's coming.
What a funny thing that is.
I mean, you said this on the sit-down we did with Jordan when you were like, man, we're the best we got.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, how did this happen where there's this like 20 of us that, you know, I think we're all good at different things and whatever.
But like, how did it all suddenly fall on these 20 people?
And now Kanye's actually given a lot of oxygen to this.
Yeah.
Even forgetting his politics.
Yeah.
Forgetting the crazy of him.
The bottom line is that There are a certain number of people who are willing to treat other people as individuals, and those people are all being kind of placed into the same category.
I mean, I've written about this now a bunch of times for National Review.
Just the idea, again, that if you look at the panoply of people who are now friendly with one another, it's people like Sam and you and me and Jordan and Brett Weinstein and Eric.
I mean, look, I don't know if you can have a more polarized set of people politically than that.
And yet a more unified group of people who want to have honest conversations than that.
And it's because they reject identity politics, which I think is at the core of all this.
So I want to talk to you a little bit about Dave Rubin the human, because we get Dave Rubin, the set of views all the time.
He did the robot.
Now let's get to the human.
Exactly.
I never allow people to ask me this question, because then everything goes on the fritz and the sparks start coming out of my head and all that's what the yarmulke hides.
But it's not horns.
It's actually my wiring.
Yeah, exactly.
So let's talk about what your life's like, because you mentioned the secular Jew versus religious Jew thing.
So where are you religiously?
What is it that you believe?
So first, uh, I'll start kind of with the end here and then I'll go backwards.
You know, it's funny.
I, I, because I interviewed a lot of atheists in a row and when we started my show as the interview show on aura TV, the first interview I did was with Sam and then subsequently I got on a lot of the skeptic community, the atheists and whatever.
I love having those conversations.
I know you like having them too by the way.
And I think the most important conversations in many ways.
So yeah.
Whether we agree or disagree, that's what it's all about.
Like, what is going on here?
Let's figure it out.
Why do you think it?
It's a wonderful conversation to have.
But anyway, I had a whole slew of them.
Guys that I really, really like from wide ranges of backgrounds.
From Gad Saad and Pete Boghossian and Michael Shermer and a whole slew of people all over the place.
Politically, ethnically, etc.
And because of that, people started saying that I was an atheist.
I had never said I was an atheist, but people kept saying it.
Then I was on, I think the first time I had Milo on, and Milo was ripping atheism.
And it basically, I felt he kind of put me into a place where I kind of had to say that I- Defend it, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I had to defend it, but even more, I felt that I sort of had to say I was an atheist.
And I said it, and I don't think I had ever said it privately to anyone, or even, I didn't think it quite summed up what I believed.
But because of that, Then about a year and a half goes by, and I went off the grid last August, and I'm trying to do it every year now, and when I was off the grid- You could do it every seventh day.
That's funny.
Shabbat's a great idea.
I'm doing this, you know, I'm trying to do this off social media on the weekends, things that you tweeted.
Yeah, it's like, we have a whole religion built around this just for you, Dave.
You guys need to extend, you guys.
It needs to be extended into a 48-hour period.
That's how evil Twitter is, but that aside, that aside, I came back, and I had been off the grid for a month, and I suddenly, I just had this feeling when I was away, and away from the nonsense, and I literally didn't look at the news once, I did not watch TV once, I didn't look at social media, nothing, that I really, the word atheist did not sum up my beliefs.
It just didn't.
It felt too limiting to me.
So I basically said, I don't like that word anymore.
And then all hell broke loose, because they were all pissed at me, and like.
Right, now it turns out you're from Jew, and you know.
- Went from an atheist to being a fully observant from Jew and no longer gay married.
You know, overnight, it's amazing how that works.
- It's also stupid, but look at all these interesting people that come to this conversation.
I mean, look, you work with Andrew Klavan, was born Jewish.
- Jewish and now he's Catholic.
- Then was an old-- - Is Drew Catholic or is he Protestant?
- Or is he Protestant?
- And Drew's Protestant.
- Okay, fair enough.
- But he's Christian, yeah.
- He's Christian, right.
So what I would say is this, just quickly on my background.
I grew up in a conservative Jewish home.
We did Shabbat on Friday night, so I'm with you, I get Shabbat.
Aren't we due for a Shabbat?
What's happening there?
Well, I mean, first my wife has to get out of, like, she has to cook dinner at one point.
Why is this woman always working?
Because she's a doctor.
You've heard, she's a doctor.
I know, I know she's a doctor.
And I know people are now saying, why don't you cook dinner, Shapiro?
Because I refuse to cook dinner.
That's the answer.
I want Shapiro cooking me a Shabbat dinner.
Wow.
Yeah.
I don't know.
That feels, now I know what women feel like.
That feels so like, ah, how dare you?
But I was brought up in a conservative Jewish household.
New York, you know, it was the stereotypical Jewish household of people fighting over politics all the time, fighting over everything, and then the meal would finish and we'd be fine.
And, you know, I would be at the... when we'd have holidays, you know, Passover, whatever, Rosh Hashanah, you know, huge tables of people, and I'd usually be at the kids' table when I was young, but I always wanted to be at the adults' table because I wanted to be...
Arguing and fighting and you know all of that stuff and talking politics with everybody.
I did a semester in Israel.
I didn't know that, okay.
Yeah in junior year of college.
Nice.
97 at Be'er Sheva University or Ben-Gurion University in Be'er Sheva.
I would say this in terms of religion.
I have a huge cultural identity to the history of the Jewish people.
These are my people.
This is the story of my people.
And by the way, it's a very depressing and sad and painful history.
I mean, that's the irony.
You know, it's my favorite line about Jewishness is from Fiddler on the Roof when Tevye says, you know, we're the chosen people.
I wish he just could have chosen someone else.
You know, it's a painful history.
We are sitting here.
Three thousand years of horror punctuated by the occasional triumph.
Yeah, and some humor that got mixed in.
I mean, that's what happened.
A lot of horror creates a lot of humor.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, comedy is tragedy plus time.
Yeah.
That's what it is.
I mean, it's not a coincidence that Jews are generally funny.
I mean, it actually isn't a coincidence.
So I would say I have a huge affinity and cultural attachment to that.
And I understand the history of my people.
And even if I had no attachment to that, it's still real.
It still exists.
I can't sit here, and I think this is where you kind of want to go with this, and say that none of those beliefs, none of that set of ideas, because it's not about just saying a word, but the set of ideas that this comes from, the idea that that has nothing to do with what I think right now is completely crazy.
But I would also say this, that on the God front, you know, a lot of Jews, there's a huge amount of secular Jews, I would say, like a Steven Pinker really falls into this.
Or even, well, Sam, you know, I don't know if Sam technically, I don't know what he technically considers himself at this point.
But I would say a Steven Pinker, Eric Weinstein would be example is people who are, they're really skeptics, atheists, but absolutely Jews.
You know what I mean?
They identify with, and I think Ben-Gurion sort of had a take on this too, that if you identify with the history of these people, that that sort of is enough.
I mean, it says in the book of Ruth, right?
Your people are my people and my God and your God, my God, but it's people first and then God, which is really interesting sort of transition biblically.
Yeah.
So I didn't know that line, but, but there you go.
That, that makes some sense to me.
So, but I would say all of these people have a certain There's a certain wrestling with God, a certain... Well, that's for sure true.
And there's so much of that in Judaism.
Orthodoxy, that too, right?
I mean, the word Israel literally means struggle with God.
I mean, Yisrael, it means struggling with God.
It says right in the Bible.
So this is certainly nothing new.
I want to talk more about Judaism, but first, let's make some money.
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Okay, so back to the religion question section.
So, okay, let's get down to brass tacks.
So, where are you on God knows?
You're not an atheist, and you're also not coming to Shul with me.
You know what?
I will.
I will gladly go to Shul with you and see what's going on.
Oh, it'll be wild.
I'd be happy to do it.
Honestly, it's a lot of mumbling and a lot of chuckling, as you know.
I know what's going on.
For real, I will be more than happy to go with you.
Yeah, and you know, Prager does the Yom Kippur service, I think.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I'm happy to do those things.
I like, you know, Eric Weinstein, by the way, who's in effect a secular non-believer.
I've been to his house for Shabbat, and he does it.
So that's why, that's the confusion generally around Judaism, whether it's a culture.
I identify with the culture.
Right.
So no, I don't like the word atheism related to what I believe.
I don't know that I can fully tell you what I believe.
I just don't.
And I know some people will say, oh, that's some sort of cop out here or something.
But I have a belief in something.
I would say I'm far more of a Zionist than I am religious.
Easily.
I think you can make, you know, Sam wrote a piece a long time ago, which was people on the left hate him for, about a secular argument basically for Judaism.
Or for Israel.
He's not making an argument for me.
The religious part, whether you were wearing your yarmulke or not, doesn't matter to me.
We happen to be taping this on a Friday, whether you light candles tonight or not doesn't matter to me specifically, but that there is this absurdly tiny oasis that is a place on earth for this group of people who have been slaughtered throughout time, who, by the way, are just returning to their homeland of thousands of years ago.
You know, all these people say, well, the Jews just took this place.
They just came in and took it.
There's an awful lot of old Hebrew in this place.
You know what I mean?
Go to Jerusalem.
I don't know where all this Hebrew came from.
Right.
So I would say I'm a much bigger believer in that, that I believe every people have a right to self-determination.
And Jews finally got it.
And who hates it the most?
It's the left.
I mean, it's so sad.
The one place that defends any of their beliefs, any of their beliefs in the Middle East, that is by far the most tolerant place.
That's the place they hate the most.
And it's also the place that has given more equality to more people in the Middle East than anywhere else.
I mean, there's basically there's pretty much no Jews that live in the Arab world anymore.
There's almost no Christians.
Ask the Coptic Christians, how's it going in Egypt these days?
There was one Jew.
I went to Egypt years ago.
There was one Jew there.
I just heard that he's out of there.
So like there's literally nothing left.
And there's this one place that is a tiny bastion of freedom that is absolutely imperfect like every other state.
But that has to be under endless assault by not only just physical assault, but has to be under assault by these crackpots at the UN all the time.
I'm a much bigger and what am I defending?
I'm not defending.
I'm not defending people that want to convert people or expand people.
I'm defending people's right to live in freedom.
That's it.
I don't even want to get into how that is related to just the Peace Prize and all that, because we could do a whole other show on that, but I'm happy to do that.
I think that we're moving toward the end of the show, unfortunately, but I want to ask you, where do you think that you are going in the next five years?
Obviously, you've been doing this for three or four years with all the interviews.
What do you think is the future for Dave Rubin?
Fast forward five years down the line.
I mean, I get all kinds of crazy offers and fortunately, because my audience has been good to me and what we're doing on Patreon, I've said no to things that would make me a lot more money than I'm making right now.
And I know that I'm in a great position to figure out what I truly want to do.
I mean, look, I built a home studio.
My commute It's a nice studio, yeah.
Yeah, but my commute is 10 steps, not 10 minutes, 10 steps from my bedroom.
That's pretty good.
We've built a small, lean, strong business.
We pay all of our employees health insurance and all kinds of other benefits and all that.
And I'm so proud of what we've built.
And it's so consistent with the ideas that I'm constantly talking about.
So look, people ask me all the time, like, one of these days is it's most likely going to be Fox, I would guess, because CNN and MSNBC don't seem to want to do anything.
Yeah.
Well, CNN will put you on every now and again.
Only then I knock one of their hosts over.
No, no, no, I know you're smacking on a stelter, which is pretty sweet.
Look, could one of these places make me an offer that it would be crazy for me to say no to?
And I don't mean that just because of money, because it's not about that.
I'm happy, really.
I'm content with what I'm doing.
I want it to grow, but I'm in a good spot.
But yes, if you really believe in what you're doing, you want it to get to as many people as possible.
So could one of those offers come?
And then I'm going to have to make some kind of Sophie's Choice or something.
Yeah, it could come and I look forward to it coming and we'll see what happens.
But I would say, in terms of what I really want, I want these conversations to continue.
I truly, truly believe this.
We, Ben, are now part of something that is resetting the system.
I really believe that the whole country, the dialogue, social media, everything got so out of whack.
So haywire that Trump possibly was the only thing that could have rebooted it.
But we're now in the reboot phase.
That's not a commentary on Trump.
I believe we're in the reboot phase now.
You know, it's like when you press reset on Nintendo and you get back to the beginning and now you got to play again.
I think we've hit that button.
And now it's like, holy cow, there is fertile ground for good ideas.
So if I can continue being part of that conversation, keep finding allies where three years ago I would have found enemies.
keep being a part of what you're doing what all of these guys who who we've mentioned ad nauseum now here are doing it's like how cool is that it is really neat you know and it's fun it's really a lot of you know i walk down the street and people first off i walk down the street people say may the force be with you i mean that's amazing but So we've got three minutes left.
I was walking down the street the other day.
Some guy just yelled out classical liberalism and gave me a high five and we just kept walking.
I'm like, holy cow, like ideas are taking root.
And let's, look, we live in crazy times.
So let's try to fix it a little bit.
Otherwise, what the hell are we doing?
Exactly.
So, okay, so we've got three minutes left.
So speaking of fixing it, give me the one thing that the right needs to do and then give me the one thing that the left needs to do if we want to have a country in five years.
So the left, look, what they've needed to do is exactly what I was trying to get them to do was please rein in your most extreme forces.
Unfortunately, they're simply unable to do it because of the oppression Olympics, because of how identity politics works, and because of grouping people based on immutable characteristics in a constant competition.
They have the idea that intersectionality makes them stronger, like it's going to be like, you know, a couple of Decepticons forming Devastator, right?
It's going to be a bigger, better robot.
But that's not how it works.
It becomes a bigger crippled monster.
And that's so I don't know at this point if there's anything that they can do right now.
I would love.
Believe me, if there was a decent Democrat out there, if there was a blue dog Democrat like an old school, if Ed Koch magically reappeared or Daniel Patrick Moynihan or JFK, you know, they all in common, they're dead.
But if those people actually reappeared and said, we're going to try to fix what is wrong with the Democratic Party instead of going the Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris route, I'd be freaking thrilled.
I would be thrilled.
It's not going to happen.
What the right can do, and I think you can be a big part of this, there is such an opening for you guys right now where all of the same people that have just had it with this nonsense are going to start pushing your way.
I think you've done a really nice job of sitting down with these people.
And I think the more that that can take root in conservatism, the agree to disagree, which I think is pretty much happening, but the more that truly takes root, where you guys go, you know, we're gonna have to be okay with the idea of pro-choice.
We don't have to put it in our party platform or whatever, but we're gonna have to find some allies that believe some different stuff as us.
And the more that you guys do that, I think you will have incredible An incredible ability to build something new.
And that would be something that I would be proud to be part of.
And at this point I think you're going to find it very easy to do actually.
So that's what I hope will happen.
And then suddenly there'll be this new party or new movement that will be the widest tent and it will only be the widest tent because the other guys pushed us all out.
Exactly.
Well, this is the part where we grip our hands like Rocky III and form giant biceps.
And it's incredible.
When we do Rocky IV, we'll go to Russia and fight on Christmas Day.
We'd get serious numbers.
Oh, my goodness.
Well, I'm not sure I could take you.
You've been working out, I hear.
I've lost 17 pounds.
That's amazing.
Good for you, dude.
I'm off the off the bread.
Living clean.
Huey Lewis in the news.
Well, it's great to have you, David Rubin, my friend.
Good luck with your show.
You don't need luck.
You're doing great.
So it's great to see you.
I'll see you soon.
Thanks so much.
Thanks, man.
Thanks, man. man.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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