July 15, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
07:48
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| Welcome to the all new, relaunched, rebranded and rebooted Rubin Report. | ||
| As of this episode, right this second, we now begin our journey as a fully fan-funded show, thanks to you guys. | ||
| Just about a month ago, I announced that we were packing up, moving on from OraTV, and creating our very own production company. | ||
| My team of Amira, David, and I have worked incredibly hard to create our fan-funding campaign and make it a reality so that we could go totally independent. | ||
| When I went to sleep the night before the campaign launched, I had no idea if my career was about to end or if we were just going to be at the beginning once again. | ||
| Well, thanks to about 3,000 of you who have taken a chance on me and on us, the future of this show and the conversations we're having about big ideas and free speech are looking incredibly bright. | ||
| Because of all of you who put your money where your keyboard is, the 18 years I've spent on my career have come to fruition right now. | ||
| My own voice has been crystallized, and I now have total ownership over a forum to share the ideas I care about most. | ||
| The last month, in which I also managed to turn 40, has been the most rewarding, exhilarating, and simultaneously inspiring time of my life. | ||
| So while I've said it before, and I'll say it many times again, thank you to all of you who heard me and who rose up to the occasion. | ||
| Without a doubt, the best part of the past month has been connecting with literally thousands of you, the viewers, in one form or another. | ||
| Via email, Facebook, Periscope, Twitter, Skype, or face-to-face, I've not only talked to you, but I've listened and learned from you as well. | ||
| Within four days of our fan-funding campaign on Patreon, we hit the initial goal of 20,000 a month, allowing us to have the monthly budget not only to continue the Rubin Report, but to also go above and beyond our current workload. | ||
| We now are in a studio in which we can do more shows, eventually start live streaming episodes, and much more. | ||
| We also received an outpouring of donations from you guys to our PayPal account, | ||
| which helped us buy our new equipment and set, and which I'm incredibly excited | ||
| to finally be able to share with you today. | ||
| If you didn't contribute or you couldn't contribute, it's all good, but you should know that the 3,000 people | ||
| who did contribute are directly the reason we're back in action right now. | ||
| If you shared our message on social media, told family or friends about us, | ||
| or even just clicked play on one of our videos at the Apple Store, I thank you as well. | ||
| Sharing our message is an incredibly important piece of this whole thing. | ||
| Beyond the 3,000 donors and patrons, though, so many of you guys reached out to us, | ||
| offering services, professional services, personal services, whatever it was you guys were offering | ||
| to edit, to make graphics, to compose music, to hang lights, and so much more. | ||
| And for all of those who offered to work for us, we've got all the messages set aside, and I promise you that we're going to circle back once we get the launch fully complete and see where we're at. | ||
| What was clear to me more than anything during this time is that the issues that I care about most of honest conversation, big ideas, and free speech aren't just concepts, but are real-world events when you put them into action. | ||
| As my life has changed with this show, so have many of yours. | ||
| You're having the same conversations at home and at school and at work. | ||
| You're offering your services and support because you care about the same things that I care about. | ||
| That, to me, is how you change the world. | ||
| I can't really explain what it's like to receive such an outpouring of support for the show that I do. | ||
| Waking up to dozens of emails from people all over the world every day telling you that they believe in your message is an incredible feeling. | ||
| As I've said to many of you privately, what we're doing here has now become bigger than me or this show. | ||
| Everything that the Rubin Report has been about since we launched in September seems to be coming to a head right now. | ||
| Our politics are more frayed than ever. | ||
| Our conversations seem dumber than ever before. | ||
| We shout down those we disagree with. | ||
| That's becoming the norm. | ||
| And our need to find some truth through the endless sea of noise has never been greater. | ||
| This has been my focus since we started, and clearly it's time for us all to double down on that mission. | ||
| Thanks to our monthly patrons, I won't have to make corporate deals I don't want to make, and never have to enter partnerships that could confuse or negate this message. | ||
| You've given us the runway to do the show as we see fit, without worrying if the lights will go on tomorrow. | ||
| Now, not only do we know that they'll go on, but we know that the show can grow exactly as we want it to, while never wavering from our commitment to real dialogue and honest conversation. | ||
| If you've donated on Patreon or PayPal, whether it was a dollar or five hundred dollars, you can now consider yourself a producer of The Rubin Report. | ||
| And by the way, the campaign still continues, and the more it grows, the more content we can create. | ||
| So yes, rubinreport.com slash donate is still up. | ||
| And if you can't donate, please just help bring awareness to what we're doing, whether on social media or shouting from the rooftops. | ||
| That's a little old school, but I hear it can be quite effective. | ||
| All right, now it's on to season two of the completely fan-funded version of the Rubin Report. | ||
| In some ways, it was kind of tough figuring out who to get for the first episode, but all roads seem to lead back to one person. | ||
| And that person just so happens to be the same person who season one started with way back last September. | ||
| Sam Harris is one of the clearest thinkers, honest brokers, and logical debaters I know. | ||
| At the same time, he's become a poster child for the battle against the regressive left. | ||
| No matter what he says, the usual clown car of dishonest public figures come out to manipulate his words, trivialize his arguments, and lie about his intentions. | ||
| Never once have I heard Sam say he's absolutely right and should be above criticism, but most of the criticism I hear about him has little to do with what he actually says or thinks, and more to do with the disingenuous motives of those attacking him. | ||
| As I've said before, my political awakening was really crystallized on that infamous night of Realtime when Ben Affleck called Sam's views gross and racist. | ||
| Suddenly, the onus was on Sam and Bill Maher to prove they weren't racist, even though they were nothing of the sort. | ||
| What they did was stand up for true universal freedoms, despite the uncomfortable conversation about religion that it causes us to have. | ||
| People often ask me if I hate Ben Affleck, but the truth is, I actually thank him for that moment. | ||
| If he hadn't been so utterly ridiculous and exhibited such childish thinking, maybe my wake-up would have taken that much longer. | ||
| If anything, I hate Affleck for Batman vs. Superman, but fortunately I fell asleep through most of that garbage. | ||
| Anyway, the point is, I know that many of you also had your awakening around that event and some of the other subsequent events like Charlie Hebdo only a few months later. | ||
| It wasn't just good ideas that woke us up, it was the necessary bad ones to show us what was really going on. | ||
| Ironically, Sam had been on Realtime that night to promote his book Waking Up, a guide to spirituality without religion. | ||
| Subsequently, after that fiasco, he spent most of his book tour, which was supposed to be about finding inner peace, defending himself against charges of racism. | ||
| Maybe there's some kind of karma in that, but I'm pretty sure Sam doesn't think so. | ||
| While we're going to jump back into the debate around Islam, the election, and the left, I intend to spend much of our conversation focusing on some of the other things that Sam cares about, including free will, spirituality, and the subject of his next book, Artificial Intelligence. | ||
| I assume that by tomorrow, he'll be accused of being a robotophobe and a robocyst. | ||
| But that just comes with the territory of being someone not afraid to share their thoughts. | ||
| So one more time, though I know it won't be the last time, I want to humbly thank all of you for your support. | ||
| I'm just one guy trying to do what I think is right, and you have shown me that if you build it, they will talk. | ||
| So now we built it, and it's time to talk. |
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