Andrew Chapados interviews Dave Rubin about his new book Don’t Burn This Country, a 2023 follow-up to Don’t Burn This Book (April 2020), framing it as a survival guide against the "woke monster"—cultural shifts like gender ideology, performative anti-racism, and the "oppression Olympics." Rubin critiques AOC’s hypocrisy during her Miami Beach vacation while attacking COVID restrictions, and questions Elon Musk’s $2.96B Twitter stake (sparking a 26% stock jump) as a potential free-speech test for Donald Trump’s return. He champions decentralized platforms like Locals and Rumble, citing their growth and users (Ben Shapiro, Russell Brand), but acknowledges risks like unchecked content. Comparing Canada’s Conservative Party to U.S. establishment Republicans, he praises Maxime Bernier’s libertarian stance over their delayed COVID opposition. The episode blends economic warnings—$1,500 free silver offers from American Hartford Gold—and political strategy, urging listeners to support alternatives like Rebel News Plus ($8/month) to resist mainstream media dominance. [Automatically generated summary]
Dave Rubin was the first guest on Andrew Says and we're happy to have him back promoting his new book called Don't Burn This Country.
And I want to get into this book.
I want to get into Joe Biden and even his comments about the Canadian Conservative Party that I saw on the Rubin report.
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Let's get to Dave Rubin and all my amazing questions for my beard brother.
Joining me again, my very first guest on this show.
First Guest, First Impressions00:07:55
We're over 60 into it now.
Dave Rubin is here.
How are you, good sir?
Did I know that I was the very first guest?
You were.
I think maybe I did know that, but now I feel, am I the first repeat guest?
Probably not.
No, but you're the very first guest of this show, episode one.
Well, I feel undue pressure, and I hope that I can live up to it.
I think you already have, just judging by the quality of video feed we get from you, which is not the best for everybody.
You know what I'm saying?
Your new book.
It's mostly about lighting and video pretty much.
Whatever I'm going to say, yeah, you know, whatever.
Let's jump into it.
Your new book, Don't Burn This Country, follow up to the other book, Don't Burn This Book.
I don't think we did.
Want to tell us what inspired this book?
Why now?
Yeah, you know, it's interesting.
When I got the deal for Don't Burn This Book, which was the first book, as you just said, I was on tour with Jordan Peterson.
This was in 2018.
And, you know, being part of the Jordan experience, you know, this Canadian professor, psychology professor, who suddenly was touring the world, telling people to stand up straight with their shoulders back and fix their life and own yourself and your thoughts and make a better world by starting with yourself.
It was such a worldwide phenomenon that I had started having all of these thoughts and people were recognizing me more and the show was really blowing up and all this stuff.
And then they reached out to me, the publishers, and they said, you know, we want you to write a book.
And basically the first book was in essence, hey, this is what I think about stuff.
These are the principles I believe in, which are classically liberal principles.
And I lay out all of those thoughts.
I relate them to the politics of the day.
And that really was what the first book was.
And then that was two years ago that we published it.
It was in April of 2020, so quite literally two years ago this month.
And then over the last two years, between the explosion of wokeism, between the lunacy of COVID, the craziness of all of our political systems and everything else, I started thinking, well, you know, laying out the principles is nice and it's good and it's worthy of doing.
And I'm so pleased that so many people enjoyed that book.
But what is the next step after that?
The next step after that is what do you do if the woke monster continues to march on you, if all of the nonsense that we are fighting all of the time continues to grow.
So, you know, boys are girls, girls are boys, two plus two is five.
Being non-racist is now being racist.
All of the endless craziness.
I mean, that's really what it is, just craziness that we're dealing with.
It's not stopping.
So laying out the ideas that I believe it isn't enough.
What would be perhaps enough, and the jury's out on this, we'll see what happens, would be, hey, here's some of the things that you can do in your own life to live a better life in the midst of it and to fix yourself so that you will be prepared when the wokesters march on you and the and the mob marches on you and the government comes for you and all of those things.
So that's really what Don't Burn This Country is about.
It's more of, I would say, a how-to book in terms of how to fight this and live a good life, while the first book was more of.
Hey, this is what I believe and I I hate to say it, but they'll most likely have to be a third book, which is okay.
They kept coming and uh, now how do we get to another planet?
Over the past couple years, I agree, people have started to move towards more.
So what can we do now?
We've been complaining, let's say, for five years, since Trump, and what can we do now to start fighting back, whether it's universities or just culturally, and I think that's a good step and a good direction to take for a topic of a book, and I wrote down a couple things I wanted to ask you about from there.
One of the quotes is, um, the woke mob cannot keep up with their own wokeness.
You want to explain what you mean by that?
We see a lot of that, especially with stuff like, you know, trans men or whatever it is in sports.
Now do you want to explain that quote?
Yeah, so look, the woke thing because it's not connected to what I would say are sane first principles is always trying to out woke itself.
This is what some people call this, the oppression Olympics, or sort of the intersectional hierarchy.
You know that at the bottom of this is if you're a straight white Christian man, you are the worst of the worst.
And then if you're a uh, if you're a gay person, you're up here.
If you're a trans person, you're above a gay person.
If you're also a lesbian and a female, you're up here.
If you've got a limp, you're up here.
A lazy eye, you're here.
All of these, all of these perceived oppressions, give you worth.
So what that does is people are constantly chasing their oppression.
They're trying they are literally trying to find new oppressions.
They are trying to find new perceived victimhoods so that that will hopefully put them in the in the hierarchy, at a higher spot than somebody else.
It's a horrific way to live and it's it's.
It's actually, I would argue, anti-human.
I mean, I think the point of being human is so that you can think and and take your Your life, hopefully, somewhat seriously, so that you can accomplish the things that actually make you happy, make you feel fulfilled, and all of those things.
That's why the wokesters are so miserable.
I mean, show me a wokester, and I'll show you a miserable person.
There are some people who profit off the misery.
So, someone like AOC, I don't think is miserable.
I think she's a actually, I think at this point, she's a genuinely bad actor in all of this.
I don't know what she really believes, but she doesn't strike me as a miserable person.
She's an actor using wokeness to usher in her, you know, communist or socialist utopia.
That's what she's doing, but she's making money on it and she's getting fame and popularity so she can smile about it and do her stupid Instagram videos and all that.
But the foot soldiers of the woke are pretty miserable.
I mean, I don't have to show you that, you know, you know enough of the videos of the college kids and the professors, and everyone's militant and angry.
And by the way, they usually look pretty terrible and they're overweight.
And why is that?
And I'm not mocking overweight people, but because they don't want to take their own life seriously.
They don't want to fix themselves first to connect this back to being on tour with Jordan.
So the woke movement, because it always wants more and more and more oppression, will always try to outwoke itself.
What you want to do to counter that is believe in the individual.
Believe that you have a life.
The system may not be perfect, but if you live in the West, it's pretty damn good.
And you have a chance to do something with that life, but it's yours to go get.
It's not someone's to give you.
And it's certainly not the best move for you to just burn things down because you're unsatisfied.
Are you saying you don't enjoy the AOC wine drinking and cooking videos?
Is that what I'm hearing here?
Can I tell you that I had just moved to Miami when her video came out when she was on vacation in Miami Beach?
And our house wasn't closed yet.
So I was staying at a friend on Miami Beach and I knew exactly where she was.
I was about a half a mile away from her.
And I see this picture of her drinking a martini or a margarita in the middle of the afternoon.
Meanwhile, she's telling she won't vote in D.C. in person because of COVID, but she'll vacation.
She'll vacation in scary DeSantisville, right-wing mania, Florida.
This vile human being.
And I actually had COVID at the time.
And I thought, I should just walk out there, even though I wasn't feeling great.
My main thing with COVID, even though I was unvaxxed, my legs hurt more than anything else.
But I was like, I should just walk down to the beach and go say hi to her because this woman is just so profoundly terrible.
I mean, if you believed any of the BS that you spew about COVID or anything else, you would have never vacationed in Florida.
But what did she want?
She wanted to be free.
She wanted to drink drinks.
She wanted to go to a drag bar on South Beach, which is exactly what she did.
And these idiots, I mean, these people who have, there's only, I can't think of other words to describe them.
Elon's Twitter Gambit00:06:15
All of these people at the drag bar, it's a jam-packed drag bar, and they're applauding her.
And oh my God, AOC is here.
And it's like this lady has locked down her own bars in her place that she lives.
She comes here where you have other people fighting for your freedom and you morons are applauding her.
The extraordinary hypocrisy is not lost on me in case you can't tell.
Another thing in the book, Dave, is a lot about big tech censorship as we all are staring there in the barrel of every day, I think.
Do you think there's any hope left for these big techs?
Are we staying with Twitter?
Do you think we're, and I've been asking a few people this, are we just going to perpetually be jumping ship from Twitter to Getter to Parlor to everything?
Or is there hope for one of these big platforms?
Does Elon bring hope?
What do you think about that?
Yeah, well, obviously I wrote the book before the Elon thing, so I will address that.
But, you know, one of the things that I tried to do over the last couple of years was put my money where my mouth was.
That's why I created Locals, which really was in essence at first a Patreon replacement, and it's much more than that now.
but we eventually merged with Rumble, which most people think of as a YouTube replacement, but it really is an Amazon AWS replacement.
It's a sort of underbelly of the internet replacement so that you can host your own website without the fear of someone at Amazon just pressing a button or pulling a lever or whatever they do when they blew up Parlor because they didn't like the competition, so to speak.
To address the Elon thing, which is the most interesting part of this, look, in the last week or so, he bought 9.2% of Twitter.
I think it cost him about $2.96 billion.
The stock then went up 26%.
So the guy knows how to make a deal because just by him buying something, the value of the thing went up just like that.
So pretty clever on his part.
I think if there is a chance for Twitter to turn around, and Twitter is the most bizarre of all of them, because Twitter is the one where the communication of all of our political elite and our cultural, culturally relevant people and everything else, that's where everyone is communicating.
It's the driver of so many of the other pieces of this, the video components of it and the podcast and the rest of it.
The conversation that happens on Twitter is what pushes everything else.
That's why Twitter seems disproportionately powerful relative to the amount of users it has or who's tweeting or who's reading it, et cetera.
I think there's a chance right now with Twitter that he could turn it around in a somewhat meaningful way.
You know, suddenly they're going to give us an edit button.
Well, okay, that's nice, but that's not really what the problem is.
The problem is the banning and the suspending and the shadow banning and blocking Hunter Biden's story and the fact that the president of the United States is not allowed to be on Twitter.
But I would say this, you know, Elon's got a big headache coming because he had to have known what he was stepping into.
And everyone, the only question right now about all of this related to free speech and everything else is will he let Trump back on?
And who knows if Trump even wants back on?
But if he doesn't let Trump back on, then he's really failed as the guy that came in and said, I'm defending free speech.
But he had to know this was coming.
So what's his move there?
But you have to even go one layer deeper than that because what happens after he lets, let's say he lets Trump back on and Trump wants to go back on.
Well, will the Apple store allow Twitter to be in the App Store?
That's questionable, right?
And if he does all that and Tim Cook allows the Apple store on, then what happens with Facebook?
What happens with Pinstagram or Pinterest or whatever the hell the rest of these things are called?
Are they all going to let him back on?
You know, the guy's not on Spotify.
He's not allowed to listen to music.
So these are all interesting questions, but I suspect, I mean, Elon Musk doesn't just do things without thinking them through.
So he must be thinking about this.
What do we do related to Orange Man?
Because that is still the biggest issue.
I want to ask you about locals and Rumble.
I saw the other day Rumbles sharing record numbers.
And of course, Locals is involved with that with you.
Has everything been going smoothly with that?
Is there anything that you can tell us about coming up in the future people might be excited about?
I just want to know, the last time we spoke, you were promoting locals as this new thing, and it's grown so much into this integration with Rumble.
What do you tell people about that as it's going forward now?
Yeah, I'm glad you asked.
Look, I'm super psyched about what's going on here.
So in essence, when I started Locals, it was really just to secure my stuff.
I didn't like being so reliant on all the big systems.
So I wanted to make sure I could own my audio.
I could own my video.
I would own my user data.
You know, I have something like 1.7 million subscribers on YouTube.
I don't have any of their contact information.
The YouTube algorithm is what decides whether my own subscribers, the people who have selected to click a button to say, I like Dave in essence and I'd like to see his videos, the algorithm decides whether they see those videos or not.
So I wanted a direct way of making sure that I could communicate with my audience.
I wanted something that if I posted a video or I sent out a message, they were going to get a push notification on their phone.
No algorithmic tricks.
It was direct one-on-one, me to my audience, live chat, live video streaming, everything else.
We built it.
It started getting some really nice traction.
Eventually, we did this merger with Rumble.
Rumble, as I said, is more than a video site.
It really is an underbelly of the internet replacement for AWS, Amazon Web Services.
The company, the growth is absolutely spectacular at the moment.
And I think we're building alternative pipes.
That really is what we are trying to do.
Whether Elon fixes Twitter or not, we have a lot of things that we need to fix about the internet.
Most of it will have to go decentralized, but there's problems with decentralization too, because there's a lot of awful things online too.
There's child porn or whatever other horrific things that you can think of or not think of are online.
Do you want that decentralized where it can never be taken down?
Probably not.
So there's all sorts of questions that we have to think about legally, philosophically, technologically, et cetera.
But the growth on both platforms has been really fantastic.
I believe that capitalism and competition is always the better way to succeed rather than using the boot and the force of government.
So I'm very bullish on what's going on with Rumble.
And I would welcome people to subscribe to rumble.com slash RubinRecord.
Pleasant Thoughts on Canada00:05:15
And the names on Rumble now is just almost everybody.
Crowder, Russell Brand, the president's son, one of my favorite Jorge Masvedal Jorge come on the show.
And I want to talk more about your book tour.
But before I forget, there's a video you put out months ago during the Ottawa Trucker protest.
It's been on my mind for a long time.
And I'm like, I have to ask him about this.
You were one of the only, especially American commentators, talking about the Canadian Conservative Party.
And up here, there's still this mysticism of, you know, the Canadian Conservative Party will save us.
They've got a new guy who wants to be in charge.
He's going to be the savior to everybody.
But something you said is you basically characterize them as like sort of mainstream Republicans, establishment Republicans.
How did you get to that point?
Because it's very interesting to me considering many Canadians don't have that opinion.
And I'm in agreement with you on that.
You know, it's interesting.
Well, first off, I've really always loved Canada.
I've always loved Canada from the first time I went to Canada.
I think I was like sixth grade or something, and we took a family trip to Montreal.
And the one that I really remember later was I was about 12 years old and we went to Toronto.
And the reason that one really stuck out in my mind was there was a Nintendo exhibition in Toronto, old school 8-bit Nintendo.
I think maybe N64 or the next or Super Nintendo was just coming out, something like that.
And it just so stuck in my mind that like Toronto was this incredible place.
I also love the old school Blue Jays from back then, even though I was a Yankees fan.
I always loved Dave Winfield, who played on the Yanks.
And then of course he won a World Series and had that, I think, Game 7 hit in around 92 or so.
But anyway, so I've always had a certain affinity to Canada.
And then I had a lot of viewers over the years from Canada.
I think that, you know, Canada is an interesting place because you've got a lot of geography.
You don't have a ton of people.
And I think in some ways, the meme of, you know, Canadians are just nice, it was because Canadians sort of didn't have a lot to fight for.
And I mean that in the best sense.
It's like it's kind of worked in Canada.
So Canadians can be thought of as kind of pleasant.
And what's your major export to us?
Not necessarily oil.
It's usually very pleasant comedians that we all like, John Candy and Rick Moranis and Dan Aykroyd and all of these guys that are really kind of fun and pleasant and really jovial really more than anything else, having that Canadian spirit.
So anyway, over the years, I ended up doing a lot of public events in Canada.
And Jordan and I went up to Canada, which obviously is his home country.
And we did about 10 shows there.
And I did a bunch of shows with Maxime Bernier over the years from the People's Party of Canada.
Obviously, it affects the Libertarian Party.
And I met all of these Canadians, and I'm talking about some of the Canadian issues.
So first off, I started doing a little bit of research on what was really going on with the political parties there.
And in essence, what you guys have is you sort of have a Liberal Party, the Trudeau Party, that's kind of the woke party.
So that's what our progressives are.
And then you have a Republican party, your Conservative Party, we call it the Republican Party here, that really are just sort of liberal light.
They're not like completely insane, but they're kind of 90% insane, something like that.
Sort of what I would say the traditional Republicans are here.
They're basically just Democrats, and they go on MSNBC and they get pat on the head, and then they run around saying they're Republicans or conservatives, but they never conserve anything.
So it sort of became obvious to me.
So when I said that, a lot of people did respond to that, like that.
That was a really good assessment of what's going on up in Canada.
And then I did, I had Maxine Bernier on during the trucker situation.
We talked a little bit about that as well.
And it's like, if you care about liberty truly in Canada, you should probably spend more of your time with the People's Party and really explaining to people what liberalism or libertarianism really is.
You can also explain what classical liberalism is, but that word is so mangled that that's hard to do.
You should probably do that because the Conservative Party, they got dragged to doing something decent related to lockdowns.
They could have led on this all along, right?
They could have been screaming what Maxime and the other people were talking about and what the Truckers wanted.
The Conservatives literally had to be dragged by a truck to do it.
Yeah, and I appreciate you talking about that sort of stuff because, like I said, it might take somebody who's a Dave Rubin supporter or viewer to come to that realization, whereas here they might think, oh, he's better than Trudeau.
That's what you heard a lot last election, even though he won again.
Oh, anybody but Trudeau.
And then finally, they sort of caught up to, I'll say, my position or the Rebel News position, that the former leader of that party, Aaron O'Toole, was basically a different style of Justin Trudeau.
He went back on all of his promises.
And now we've got this Conservative Party election coming in, I think, September.
And it'd be interesting to see you cover that once the leader is selected as well there.
I want to move this beyond the paywall for a few more minutes.
So if you're not a Rebel News Plus subscriber, go to RebelNewsPlus.com.
You'll get more of Dave Rubin, which is what we all want, $8 a month or even less if you sign up for a full year with a free month subscription.