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April 26, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:09:21

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

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	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?
	You start behaving honestly.
	Free speech is more important than ever.
	As the coronavirus lockdown continues, protests have broken out around the country as people display their First Amendment rights.
	City police officials are now labeling protesting government action non-essential.
	Some have resulted in arrests.
	This is a great moment to reflect on where free speech starts, where it ends, and its importance to the citizenry.
	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.
	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.
	He's not afraid to have anyone on whether they agree or disagree.
	He's a firm believer in everyone having a chance to have their say.
	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.
	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.
	Welcome to today's Sunday special of the United States.
	Of course, our guest today is Dave Rubin.
	Well, we have bonus questions with Dave, as we do every single week.
	If you want access to the bonus questions, you should go become a member.
	All you have to do is head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
	Go to the top of our homepage over at dailywire.com.
	You'll see exactly where to click to subscribe.
	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.
	So I'm excited to welcome back my good friend, Dave Rubin.
	I believe he's the first repeat guest ever on the Sunday Special.
	So Dave, congratulations.
	I think you were maybe our first guest ever, and I think you're our first repeat guest.
	So you have made history here, sir.
	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.
	I believe Peterson was your debut show.
	I was number two.
	That's right.
	You know, I'll take it.
	So you have a brand new book out called Don't Burn This Book.
	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.
	The book is great.
	I mean, I blurbed it, so I read it a long time ago.
	The book has a lot of really terrific advice.
	There's a lot to it.
	We'll get to that in just a second.
	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.
	There is no sports.
	There are no movies.
	There is nothing.
	So how have you been living out?
	How have you been living out the coronavirus disaster as you hunker down with your husband and dog?
	Yeah, well, I guess I was a little prescient in that I decided to have a home studio before it was cool.
	I mean, in a lot of ways, my life has not changed because my house is my workplace.
	This is my garage.
	You know, my crew is no longer coming.
	So my crew is probably operating how your crew now operates, which is in their own homes.
	So we had to buy a lot of equipment and we got a satellite on the roof for Internet and the rest of it.
	But in terms of my day to day life, I mean, we're hunkered down here.
	I did get a new dog who is about to be put down because they were closing all the shelters in LA.
	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.
	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.
	I think people are going to be thinking about their jobs and their lives differently.
	Do you want to commute?
	Do you want to live in a big city?
	How reliant do you want to be on all of the institutions that we have?
	What kind of information do you want to get and where do you want to get it from?
	I think there's so many things being flipped upside down right now.
	My goal really is to just try to remain a voice of sanity through that.
	We'll see if that actually comes to fruition, but that's the plan.
	Yeah, one of the things that'll be interesting to see is whether people sort of revert to their political priors after this.
	So a major life event, and this is the biggest event any of us have ever seen.
	I mean, this really does make 9-11 in terms of scale look Almost.
	Almost piddling.
	I mean, I was there for 9-11.
	It was a life-changing event.
	And 3,000 Americans died.
	We are, you know, in the midst of a global pandemic, which is not just affecting the United States, it's affecting everybody.
	The government is forcibly shutting down the economy for everybody.
	People are staying at home.
	And yet you see, and it's really fascinating to watch on Twitter, Everybody has reverted back to their priors.
	Like, nobody is willing to have a conversation in almost the same way that nobody was willing to have a conversation five minutes ago.
	Now, the conversation five minutes ago was a little bit more woke.
	It was a lot more about, you know, identity politics.
	And now the conversation seems to be about shaming people for going out to the grocery store more than anything else.
	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.
	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.
	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?
	Maybe getting four feet within another neighbor or something like that?
	I mean, you've got to be a good citizen here in Los Angeles.
	But yes, everybody is sort of reverting to that.
	But you hit on something interesting there, which is that the woke thing does feel like it's crumbling right now.
	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.
	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
	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.
	And my hope is that the average person will take that with them post-coronavirus, but we'll see.
	So Dave, I want to ask you how you think politics are going to change beyond the woke.
	But first, I want to thank our sponsors here at the Ben Shapiro Show.
	I mean, this is a really rough time for everybody, people who are listening, people who are watching, certainly for our advertisers.
	You know, a lot of businesses are having a really tough time right now.
	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.
	And we really appreciate you patronizing our advertisers and using their products.
	They appreciate it too.
	Thank you so much and thanks to our advertisers for keeping this show and shows like it going.
	We're all trying to get through this together and I think that we will.
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	Okay, so let's talk about how politics are going to change.
	Maybe permanently, maybe not.
	Where do you think politics are going from here?
	So you've been, you've had a pretty good track record here of giving a name to each year.
	Like last year was the year of the dragon and also of odd alliances.
	This year, what was your call for this year at the beginning of this year?
	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.
	But the example I always use of why I called it Unusual Alliances was you and Sam Harris.
	I mean, two guys who disagree on literally everything from the nature of reality, God and religion and belief to taxes and states' rights.
	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.
	And then this year, I said, this will be the year that wokeism collapses.
	Now, I didn't anticipate that it was going to be through coronavirus, as we just talked about.
	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...
	It's not a competition to destroy.
	It's not a competition to build.
	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.
	And you can see them, you can see AOC kind of turning on him right now.
	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.
	I mean, Biden should be retired right now.
	That's just the sad truth.
	They will have to take Bernie out because he's an old white man.
	And then the endless competition to outwoke each other also will burn out.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	There is a unifying principle.
	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.
	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?
	The left has a sort of, well, government, should do everything and let's just fight about how much it should do.
	That's not really a unifying principle.
	That's just sort of, I feel a certain way about something and someone else feels another certain way.
	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.
	And it's like, well, yeah, you have no reason to say you're for 15.
	That doesn't make sense in an age of automation and iPads anyway.
	So why not 20?
	Why not 25?
	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.
	So they don't have a unifying principle anymore.
	And I think because of that identity, politics, wokeness, it's all going to start eating itself.
	And then, you know, just surrounded All of that.
	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.
	I think there's a huge opportunity for conservatives, libertarians, whatever you want to call that group at the moment.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	It's just that their priorities are different.
	It's the government is supposed to back this institution as opposed to this institution.
	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?
	And so there's this gap that's been opened.
	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.
	And I could see that opening up that gap.
	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.
	They told us I can't do anything I want to do.
	And when this is over, I'm going to do whatever I want to do.
	And I don't want the government in my business.
	I don't want the government dealing with me economically.
	I don't want the government telling me what I can and cannot do with my life and just leave me the hell alone.
	There's the final, you know, the Rand Paulian libertarian moment finally arrived.
	And on the other hand, you could see people saying, listen, this was a pitch perfect example of why massive government is necessary.
	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.
	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.
	That could be the next battle.
	And that's a battle more about kind of fundamental principles even than wokeism is.
	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?
	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.
	So let's put that aside for a second.
	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.
	Now look, I understand, and our founders understood, by the way, that the states can't absolutely do everything, right?
	The states can't control the borders of a national country.
	They can control their own borders.
	There are certain things that we need the federal government to do.
	But my hope is that most people are gonna realize Boy, we had this coronavirus thing, and what did I do the entire time?
	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.
	And maybe, just maybe, the answer isn't that we have to give more power to all of these things.
	The answer is that we have to take the power back.
	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?
	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.
	That's my view of it.
	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.
	I actually understand that argument quite well, and I'm sympathetic to it.
	I'm actually not even saying it's wrong.
	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.
	I think that's what the human experience is.
	So I don't want to use the government for those sort of moral moves.
	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.
	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.
	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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	So Dave, I want to talk about the wake-up calls that you talk about.
	So you lay forth a bunch of lessons in your book, and there really is a lot of great advice in this book.
	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.
	And I remember being slightly critical of the title, actually.
	And you obviously took my advice.
	I mean, clearly that was the deciding factor here.
	And you decided to move in a different direction.
	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.
	One of the things you talk about is the necessity of embracing wake-up calls that you experience in your life.
	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.
	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.
	At the same time, they were ripping up Clarence Thomas, and he thought of himself, he thought, this is crazy.
	I mean, the hypocrisy here is nuts.
	You talk about your wake-up calls.
	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?
	Well, I mean, I just don't care about the Young Turks.
	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.
	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.
	You must know David Webb from Fox and Sirius XM, right?
	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.
	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.
	All of the things that you hear about anyone who dare be a black conservative, right?
	So we hear this about our friend Larry Elder, we hear this about Thomas Sowell, Candace Owens, etc., etc.
	Now, I'm watching them go on and on about what a self-hating black man he is and what a sellout he is.
	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.
	We disagreed on everything.
	I mean, he was firmly on the right.
	This is my left hand.
	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.
	And I know that David Webb is a good man.
	I know he is an honest man who's fighting for what he believes in.
	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.
	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.
	Well, what is prejudice?
	It is prejudging.
	And you are prejudging him.
	You think black people must all think the same thing.
	That actually is bigotry.
	That actually is racism.
	And I think what happened to me in that moment was it wasn't ephemeral anymore.
	It was actually real and tangible because I knew him.
	So it wasn't just some imaginary person on television.
	So that was one that really did it to me.
	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.
	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.
	You should be able to criticize any idea.
	You should be able to criticize any religious idea.
	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.
	But you don't want to be bigoted towards people.
	And that was all that Sam Harris, who I didn't even know who he was.
	I was watching it live and I didn't even know who Sam Harris was at the time.
	But obviously I knew Bill Maher.
	And Affleck turns to the two of them and the famous now infamous line is he calls them gross and racist.
	And they were nothing of the sort.
	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.
	And this mild-mannered neuroscientist who said nothing racist, he was a racist.
	And I thought, man, Bill Maher has stood up for everything you guys purport to believe in.
	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.
	Now, because Ben Affleck, Batman, says one thing that sort of sounds right if you don't think about it, now he's evil.
	And that was another wake-up call to me because I saw them doing that with everyone, anyone you disagree with.
	is suddenly evil.
	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.
	It was when the Charlie Hebdo attacks, a bunch of jihadists broke into the Charlie Hebdo cartoonist offices in Paris, France.
	And immediately I was on a panel on the Young Turks and there was no, there was almost no sympathy for the victims.
	The sympathy suddenly went to, "Oh, you poked a bear.
	You shouldn't make cartoons of these things.
	Now, meanwhile, they made fun of Orthodox Jews all the time with Charlie Hebdo.
	Of course, they made fun of the Pope and Christianity and every idea under the sun.
	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.
	Which we need to do, by the way.
	We need to mock the things that would love to control us and destroy us.
	But the outrage had nothing to do with the victims.
	The outrage was that we might then cause bigotry to other people.
	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.
	And it's something like 3 out of 400 or something like that.
	There were far more against the Pope and Orthodox Jews and the rest of it.
	But anyway, all of these things they just added up to where the rubber started meeting the road.
	That was really it.
	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.
	You didn't want to silence me for it.
	You didn't want to take my job for it.
	And then that really opened up a whole other world that I didn't expect.
	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.
	And it seems like the easiest thing to do, Twitter is the worst for this.
	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.
	Social media rewards people from aligning other people's motives.
	It's not just that you can wreck somebody's argument or point out where they've been wrong.
	It's that if they did something wrong, it wasn't a pure mistake.
	It's because they must be stupid or they must be evil.
	And social media absolutely rewards that.
	It's sort of a microcosm of the darkest side of humanity, but so much of politics is built around it.
	So you've made the decision that you are going to really restrict your social media diet in a pretty significant way.
	Even I, right?
	I have a social media diet once a week of Friday night to Saturday night.
	I can't be on social media.
	That wasn't enough of a diet for me.
	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.
	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.
	It really is bad for us.
	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.
	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.
	It's called Shabbat.
	And it's like, yeah, well, I took Shabbat and I added an extra day because I really try to take the weekends off.
	Although I'm in the same situation as you during this Corona situation, I have been on there a bit more.
	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.
	We do a week, a weekend movie together where we watch and then we do a video chat after.
	I'm trying to use it for some other things other than the constant destruction.
	But I think to your broader point about how we all behave on there, look, we try.
	I see it with you and I know for myself.
	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?
	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.
	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.
	But it rewards sort of this endless game of one-upsmanship.
	So for me, I have found that if I try not to look at it on the weekends, I find that helpful.
	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.
	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.
	Just doing that will give you, so that when you get out of bed, because otherwise you do it.
	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.
	That's not a great way to start the day.
	You probably get 300 doing it, and I might be a little conservative in the numbers there.
	So I think doing some simple things like that and then the other thing that I do.
	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.
	And guess what?
	It turned out that I didn't even miss that much.
	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.
	So that that's a big news story.
	That was one.
	But a lot of the stuff that you told me about was about Michael Cohen.
	Think how actually irrelevant that is, if you think about today's world right now.
	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.
	End your summer in a clear-minded way.
	And if you can't do that, try two one-week things per year.
	Christmas to, it doesn't matter what religion you are, but we all shut down basically from Christmas to New Year's, right?
	So take that one week, just don't be on social media.
	Or the last week of the summer, right before Memorial Day.
	You know, that last week of August into that Tuesday, basically, after Memorial Day.
	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.
	We are technological adolescents in this thing, and we don't know how it's changing us.
	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?
	This is our only mode of outside communication.
	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.
	And there's a million reasons related to censorship why that's dangerous.
	So I just think we have to be careful with all these tools.
	We don't know exactly what they are.
	We grab them, we love them.
	And you may find out that fire can be used for bad, not just to heat the food.
	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.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Alrighty, so let's talk a little bit about social media censorship.
	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.
	Now, it would be ungrateful for me, here at The Daily Wire, to say that social media has been terrible to us.
	It hasn't.
	I mean, Facebook we've been wildly successful on.
	Obviously, we have an incredibly successful YouTube channel.
	But you've personally had lots of situations over at Rubin Report where they've demonetized your videos preemptively.
	I remember they demonetized a conversation that I think you, Jordan, and I had that had 5 million views.
	And they demonetized that one, if I'm not mistaken.
	And they kind of, as a rule, they basically just demonetize you right off the bat over at YouTube for no apparent reason.
	So what's your take on what should happen with these companies?
	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.
	Yeah, so look, my general premise on this is I want these companies to be able to operate however they want to operate.
	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?
	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.
	That being said, my preference is to get the government out of the way and you just let them do their thing.
	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.
	Of course, they were all off the record, at least for mine, so I can't even repeat what was said.
	But people will say, Dave, how can you be complaining?
	How can you be complaining?
	You don't want the government to be involved.
	How can you complain?
	And it's like, no, no, no, no, no.
	That's the complete reverse of how this all works.
	I don't want the government involved.
	So I'm using my voice to put pressure on the company as a public person to change their behavior.
	That is that is the opportunity you have in a free society.
	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.
	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.
	They are telling us that they will throttle certain accounts.
	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?
	As you've talked about, one of the things you miss right now is going to temple on Fridays.
	Well, OK, you can't do that right now.
	So they've all of the way you can get to the world is through their pipes.
	So I'm very worried of all the things they can do to us.
	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.
	You should own your digital home.
	And that's what we're doing.
	We're building digital homes for creators.
	So you can have video and a news feed and you can like and you can comment.
	You own all the content.
	You own the data.
	And here's the thing.
	We're not creating a platform.
	What we're creating are digital homes that you can choose to connect with other people's digital homes for a network effect.
	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.
	I can boot them out.
	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.
	You can say whatever you want on the public street out outside.
	But the beauty is we're not deep.
	If I kick someone out of my local, I'm not deplatforming them.
	Because they can still be in anyone else's local as long as they abide by their rules.
	You set your own rules in your local.
	So, originally, the idea behind this was that we're creating digital seasteads.
	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.
	I'm creating digital homes for creators.
	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.
	And we're building, and we'll see what happens.
	You know, can David beat Goliath in this case?
	Can Dave beat Google?
	I don't know.
	We'll see.
	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.
	I want to get back to some of the lessons that you have in Don't Burn This Book.
	One of the ones that really struck me, because it was actually rather moving, is your discussion of your relationship with Jordan Peterson.
	So obviously, Jordan is on the cover of the book.
	You're very tight with Jordan.
	I'm friends with Jordan, but you are really good friends with Jordan.
	I mean, you were on the road with Jordan for two years as his warm-up act, essentially.
	And the events are fantastic.
	If you've ever been to one of the events with Jordan and Dave, I'd highly recommend it.
	I was privileged to help warm up the crowd at one of the events, and it really was a lot of fun.
	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
	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.
	The crowd goes freaking bananas.
	We're up there, we're making jokes at each other, mocking each other.
	You do a pretty funny impression of Jordan.
	I mean everyone, it was a freaking love fest in that room.
	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.
	And it's like, man, we took a room of truly diverse people and gave them a great time.
	We put differences aside.
	That's what America is all about.
	That's a beautiful thing that we need to cherish.
	And here are the supposed tolerant people who are upset that we actually were able to accomplish that.
	I know the fact that you and I can be nice to each other really does drive people up a wall.
	It's pretty hilarious.
	But to talk about Jordan for a second.
	Obviously, Jordan's been going through some very, very difficult times.
	You don't have to be a spokesperson here.
	Have you heard from him?
	How he's doing?
	So I don't want to say anything that's not publicly known at the moment.
	I did see him a few months ago.
	I can tell you this.
	He's getting better.
	He will be back.
	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.
	He was very open and would talk about it often during the lectures that he was taking a small amount of this.
	found out in the middle of the tour that his wife had what they thought was terminal cancer.
	Thank God it turned out not to be terminal.
	And she's actually doing much better.
	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.
	You know, like really the preeminent public thinker of our time, traveling the world, the fame, the hit pieces.
	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.
	Living through all of that, then thinking his wife is gonna die.
	I mean, I was literally at lunch with him.
	We were at lunch, at a steakhouse, of course, when he got the call about his wife.
	I saw this man live through something Unbelievably extraordinarily horrible or as he would say brutal and always put his best foot forward.
	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.
	I am really, really trying to do that.
	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.
	And I saw him trying to do that.
	And I saw him actually accomplishing it.
	So, you know, he's got a little, he's got something to deal with right now.
	And I have no doubt that he will deal with it and that he'll be back.
	Yeah, you tell a pretty great story.
	in the book about how Jordan dresses when he's out in public.
	And it is true.
	I mean, Jordan dresses the same way all the time.
	I'm old enough to remember when Jordan dressed more like a schlump.
	Like, I remember right at the beginning when Jordan was not nearly as natty in his attire as he is now.
	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.
	And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the lessons that you've learned from Jordan.
	Yeah, well the dressing, it's just a very simple one, but it's just to present yourself a certain way to the world.
	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.
	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.
	And one of the questions that would often come up is, Jordan, when did you become a middle-aged male fashion icon?
	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.
	And part of that is is looking the part that I want to look.
	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.
	And there was one day where we were in Stockholm, Sweden.
	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.
	But they always say we could just model ourselves after Sweden, we'd be in much better shape.
	Well, the two shows that we did in Sweden, Sold out literally in three minutes, three minutes for two shows.
	And the foreign minister of Sweden issued a statement when we came back to Sweden.
	We did one and then I think we left for Finland.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	So I walk into H&M, which is one of their proud exports, I walk into H&M and I grab the hat.
	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.
	I'm going to see Dr. Jordan Peterson tonight.
	And the cashier, who's about the same age, looks at him and says, I'm going to see Peterson tonight.
	And I tapped the kid on the shoulder and I said, hi.
	And they immediately knew who I was.
	And I thought, this is absolutely incredible.
	I am, I am across the world right now.
	Right?
	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.
	How much more do you want of that?
	And then one other I'll give you real quick.
	We're in, I think it was in Dublin.
	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.
	So they have a little theater door on the side.
	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.
	We're beat at the end of the day.
	We're in the alley, and we see these two guys hugging.
	One looks like he's about 60, the other one's maybe in his mid-20s.
	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.
	It's like, how much more of a real-world example of goodness do you wanna see?
	And I could give you a million of those stories.
	So in a second, I want to ask you about the the sort of hatred that you've received.
	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.
	Get to that in just a second.
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	So one of the chapters of the book, Dave, is about stop worrying about whether you're a Nazi.
	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.
	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.
	So how do you deal with — the easier accusation, I think, is always the, they call you a Nazi, right?
	Which is absurd.
	You're a Jewish gay man who is a classical liberal.
	Like, I can't think of many people other than myself who I would think of as less of Nazis.
	You know, Jordan has been called a Nazi.
	I've been called a Nazi.
	Sam has been called a Nazi.
	Like, everybody is called a Nazi.
	And frankly, none of us — we did not see that coming.
	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?
	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?
	Twitter and Vine videos at the time, Six Seconds and Instagram and the rest, everything was getting smaller.
	And I said, I'm going to do a long form interview show.
	And I'm actually thrilled that, you know, Rogan was starting right around the same time, or that you do this show.
	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.
	First off, as a general rule, I don't even think, we're not in competition, but I believe in competition.
	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.
	I mean, that's, I always operate that way myself, and I know that you would do the same.
	What I started doing was, let me have respectful conversation.
	Everything on cable news is people destroying each other, sound bites.
	There's no way you can extrapolate an idea properly.
	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.
	And that's all we were getting, especially out of cable news.
	I thought, let me sit down with people.
	Let me kind of tell them what I'm thinking, hear what they're thinking, and see what happens.
	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.
	My whole goal was to clean up the mess that we discussed previously.
	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.
	Here's the real answer.
	That's not really what I said.
	And here's the real answer.
	I did that.
	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.
	It was our first show there.
	I wasn't planning on doing an interview show.
	I was going to still do a sort of panel view style show that I was doing with the Young Turks.
	But the second I was done, I was like, that felt real.
	That felt important and valuable to me.
	And I thought, that's what I want to do.
	So we immediately flipped the format.
	That's what we decided to do.
	And what's interesting is from that conversation, it opened up doors to many people that were thinking the same things I was.
	You know, people that were liberal in the truest sense of it.
	And, you know, another great example is Majid Nawaz, who is a true liberal.
	He is a classical liberal who is hated by the left and now sort of embraced by the right.
	And there were just tons and tons of people that that experience kept happening.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	It's like that, you know, there isn't a pope.
	There isn't like the guy who tells everybody what they're supposed to think kind of thing.
	There's more of we're all sort of thinking different things.
	Some of us may be orthodox.
	Some of us may be conservative.
	Some of us may be reformed.
	Some of us may be atheists, but still culturally Jewish, whatever.
	And I know you have different feelings on all of those things.
	But the combined feeling of all that is that debate was always healthy.
	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.
	Anything you could think of would be argued about all night long at the dinner table.
	And then dessert would be served and everybody was okay.
	So I grew up with that feeling that you can argue things out.
	I'm also from New York, you can argue things out and you don't punch each other.
	I grew up in Long Island, I was born in Brooklyn but most of my formative adult years were in Manhattan.
	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.
	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.
	I have never tried to get anyone or undercut anyone.
	I have genuinely been there to hear what they think.
	I think that I've usually I'm sure not always, but usually ask the right questions.
	Is it possible that now and again a follow-up that I should have got to, I missed?
	Well, you're doing an interview show right now.
	You know it's very possible.
	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.
	So that's how I conduct my interviews.
	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?
	I had her on and she's a collectivist.
	She believes that white people are guilty for what they've done to black people.
	This is a ridiculous concept to me because I'm not guilty for my father's sins.
	Now, no one in my family owns slaves anyway, but I'm not guilty for anyone else's sins other than my own.
	So collectivism as a rule Is an absurd ideology to me, but I didn't want to treat her ideas.
	I didn't want to battle her the entire time.
	I wanted to hear what she said.
	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.
	The lens through which you view the world is a collectivist lens.
	And the lens which I view the world is an individualist lens.
	That's a fundamental impasse that I just have to put out there so that we can now have a normal conversation.
	Because otherwise I'm bringing people in here to browbeat them constantly and I'm just not that interested in that.
	But I don't mind criticism.
	I actually like criticism.
	When it's healthy criticism, I like it actually.
	That's how you get better.
	So you mentioned in there religions.
	I may as well ask you, you make some sort of religious overtures in the book that are interesting.
	So where are you?
	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.
	So where are we in your journey and how am I doing?
	Ben, I'm gonna have you baking gay cakes, so we'll see what happens here.
	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.
	One of the reasons we're seeing such chaos out of the left is that secularism run rampant.
	It gives you what the left is.
	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.
	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.
	Then the next person comes and says the $20 thing, and then they're morally good.
	Now you gotta cut them down, and there's a million versions of this we could go through.
	The founders of the United States talked about God-given rights.
	The United States does not make me free.
	I was born free.
	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.
	The government can protect your rights.
	It should protect your rights.
	And it can take those rights away.
	But it did not make me free.
	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.
	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.
	And it's like, yeah, a lot of great ideas happened from the Enlightenment, right?
	Free thought and open inquiry.
	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.
	But the point is that it took Churning of ideas for thousands of years to get to the Enlightenment strikes me as very thin.
	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.
	That's why liberalism has been decimated by the progressives.
	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.
	They have no mechanism to stop it.
	You know what the mechanism to stop it is?
	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.
	There is good and bad, and it's not because of us, it's because it exists.
	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.
	There is a reason that I believe that Dave can beat Google, and it's because David beat Goliath.
	Those stories have some meaning over time that will allow us to flourish as human beings.
	And does that mean that you can be completely secular and atheist and totally moral?
	Of course you can.
	But I don't think a society can function on that over the long haul.
	So, Dave, one of the other areas where I'm determined to move you is on the abortion issue.
	You and I have debated this 35 times on your show.
	And you've called yourself reluctantly pro-choice.
	My goal is to make you more and more reluctant until the point where you are no longer pro-choice.
	So how am I doing on that score right now?
	All right, well, first off, wait, I didn't fully give you what you wanted on the other one.
	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.
	But I mean, we'll have some wine, we'll have some challah if we can get it.
	It's often sold out here in Los Angeles.
	There's a lot of Jews here.
	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.
	So that's like a secular lens on something that is timeless, which is consistent with everything else that I'm telling you here.
	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.
	Your argument was, well, Dave, if you're saying they can feel pain at 20, you do acknowledge it's a life at 19.
	And I said, yes, Ben, actually, as a thinking person, I have to concede that.
	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.
	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.
	Again, I want to say I do believe that basically the point of conception is life.
	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?
	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.
	And I think a 12-week position is more than enough time.
	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.
	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.
	I mean, I think most people know that.
	It's sort of the thing we don't really talk about.
	But I don't really take any pleasure in this topic.
	But I would say this, I've moved in a certain way.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	But the last line of the chapter, in effect, is saying, now that you all hate me, let's move on.
	So, Dave, what's your media diet like these days?
	Obviously, the media has fragmented in new ways.
	People see this as the end of the world.
	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.
	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.
	And then the experts are like, well, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty in these models.
	You say, well, there's a lot of uncertainty in those models.
	You want to get people out there back to work and you want everyone infecting each other.
	It's like, whoa, hold up a second.
	I just said exactly the same thing that Fauci and Birx are saying.
	And when they say it, it's them being the experts.
	When I just repeat back to them what they said, then it's me taking coronavirus lightly.
	The narratives get set by the media.
	And then if you violate the narrative in any way, it's, I mean, it's amazing.
	I spent the last month Saying to one side, no guys, we should probably take this pretty seriously.
	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.
	So never have I had less faith in the media to bring us any element of truth on this sort of stuff.
	But where do you come down on, you know, you have a whole chapter in here about how to spot fake news.
	What does your media diet consist of these days?
	I mean, I assume you still read the New York Times, even though it's labeled both of us gateways to the Nazi party.
	Yes, yes.
	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.
	It was a really wonderful moment.
	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.
	The article was eventually taken down by Medium, not by the author who was analyzing data.
	It was taken down by Medium.
	And they talk about how this is misinformation because he wasn't being alarmist about coronavirus.
	I happen to know the author, It's a guy by the name of Aaron Gin.
	I think he's a decent fella.
	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.
	So they include me in this chart showing that when I tweeted it, it really started going viral and it's all about misinformation.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	You're telling me when you put my name in a chart in an article about misinformation, that's not mentioning me.
	It's not mentioning me.
	And of course, if you Google the definition of the word mention, it qualifies as a mention.
	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?
	You start behaving honestly.
	But they can't do it.
	The ship has sailed.
	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.
	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.
	They don't even have an, uh, uh, ombudsman, ombudsman.
	Is that the word?
	Yep.
	Yeah.
	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.
	It is propaganda.
	CNN is propaganda.
	I'll give you a real good example of this.
	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.
	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.
	And we're watching the speech, and I was actually in the second row.
	And, you know, it's Trump.
	He goes up there.
	He's half stand-up comic.
	He's, you know, he's getting the crowd going, the whole thing.
	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.
	And he says this thing about wind power.
	And he goes, you know, I love wind power.
	Nobody knows more about wind power than me.
	I've studied wind power my whole life.
	And then he goes on and on about wind power back to the script.
	But that line, obviously, those few lines were obviously improv.
	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.
	And he's studied it his whole life.
	And then voila, all the articles come out.
	Donald Trump says he knows more about wind power than anyone.
	And it's like, man, you idiots.
	He was joking.
	And then actually made some interesting points about the validity of wind power and how important it should be or should not be.
	And then linked that also to failed other green projects that we've done, like Solyndra and a whole bunch of other stuff.
	Anyway, so where do I get my diet from?
	It's very difficult.
	I think you guys at The Daily Wire are doing a nice job.
	I think The Blaze is doing a nice job.
	I do occasionally read some things out of The Times and The Washington Post, but they're pretty crappy.
	I try to pay attention.
	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.
	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.
	It's hard to, it's hard to distill truth out of this madness all the time.
	And, uh, I think you do a pretty damn good job of it, but it is not easy to do.
	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.
	So Dave, I want to ask you a couple more questions.
	I want to ask you what you got coming up for Rubin Report the rest of the year.
	I also want to ask, I heard that you have a great meeting President Trump story that I definitely want to hear.
	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.
	There's lots of great stuff happening for subscribers.
	Become a subscriber right now and you hear the end of our conversation over there at dailywire.com.
	Well, Dave, it's great to talk to you.
	Congratulations on the book.
	People are going to enjoy it.
	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.
	Really appreciate it.
	Good to talk to you, dude.
	Thanks, Shapiro.
	Good seeing you.
	Good seeing you.
	Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Associate producer, Katie Swinnerton.
	Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
	Host production is supervised by Alex Zingaro.
	Editing is by Jim Nickel.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Coromino.
	Hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.
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	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

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