Woke ideology “infects every system that it’s in,” says Dave Rubin. “There’s no woke enough for the wokesters.”
At the recent FreedomFest conference in Rapid City, South Dakota, we sat down with Dave Rubin to discuss an alliance of free thinkers—from classical liberals to religious conservatives to libertarians. There’s an opportunity for diverse groups to unite against the onslaught of woke ideology, Rubin says.
This week, Rubin will be announcing the title of his next book, right before he disappears off the grid for a month.
Below is a rush transcript of this American Thought Leaders episode from July 27, 2021. This transcript may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Jan Jekielek: Well, Dave Rubin, it’s so great to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Dave Rubin: Jan, it’s good to be with ya. All these freedom loving people here and here we are once again. They haven’t kicked us out yet.
Mr. Jekielek: You were talking a little bit earlier today about, you described decent liberals being mugged by reality as becoming a phenomenon that you experienced some years back, maybe four or five years ago, right? It’s just something that’s accelerated rather dramatically.
Mr. Rubin: Well, it’s interesting because as you know, I live in the once great state of California that hopefully we’re going to recall this Gavin Newsom guy and going to make great again. That sounded like a little Trump riff there, but I would just like it to be anything better than it is at the moment.
But over the course of the last year and a half with these lockdowns and the mask mandates and just the completely often arbitrary, ridiculous decisions that were made in some cases by unelected officials often by complete hypocrites and watching Gavin Newsom go to French Laundry, one of the most expensive restaurants in the state, in the country actually.
The woman, Sheila Kuehl, who was the three to two deciding vote when they shut down restaurants, outdoor eating last time and then she went out to eat at dinner that night. And you see all these inconsistencies.
What it makes me realize is when I come to a place like this, is that this stuff is the right idea. This stuff, simple freedom, stay out of people’s lives and the reason I bring up California with your question is these, these sort of good liberals mugged by reality.
When I would go to these rallies to open up the state, I would meet good liberals. These were not Republicans. Maybe they were Democrats, but they were usually apolitical people, but they were business owners, restaurateurs, things of that nature who suddenly couldn’t go to work, who suddenly couldn’t put food on the table, et cetera, et cetera.
And then suddenly they were like, whoa, now I see it. The thing that I’ve been talking about for years that something is wrong with the Left. That liberalism is not working in a modern, conventional sense. And then they start seeing it.
I think once you see it, you can’t unsee it. So the question is, will they actually then go as far to say, maybe vote for a guy like Larry Elder or Caitlin Jenner or just someone that is not Gavin Newsom. We shall see.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s go back to I guess it’s four or five years ago and you sort of had your, I don’t know what to call it.
Mr. Rubin: Awakening.
Mr. Jekielek: I was going to use that term, but it seems like every word has become so loaded right now. It’s means something different than when you actually mean.
Mr. Rubin: From woke to awake.
Mr. Jekielek: Wait, so you were woke?
Mr. Rubin: Look, I was a lefty for sure. I was a progressive. I was a Bernie supporter. I worked for the young Turks network. You can find videos of me supporting Bernie Sanders.
Woke at that time wasn’t fully a thing. Identity politics say five years ago, where now we all understand what it is and that it’s infecting virtually everything in this obsession with race and all of our immutable characteristics, which it’s just so dangerous and anti-American in so many ways.
That was just sort of starting. I would say I was a progressive in that I believed in those economic policies, I believed in those foreign policies, things of that nature.
The wokeism part of it was just starting. The obsession with race and things like that. I don’t know that I was ever fully woke like that, but I certainly was a Lefty. And then when I started saying, Hey, we Lefties let’s stop calling everybody racist. Let’s try not to impugn motives. Let’s try to agree to disagree or put our hand across the table and see what happens.
All I got was hate from the Left. And then the bizarre part of course was that all I got was a handout from the right saying, hey, we’re over here. You want to talk to us? And then fairly quickly I realized that these were not people that were as bad as I had been led to believe.
Mr. Jekielek: I can’t help but think back, I’m sure you’ve discussed this probably a thousand times over the past few years, but I was just talking about it with someone earlier today. The moment that you decided to keep on your show, where you actually have Larry Elder, funny that you mention him. He challenges you on systemic racism and you realize I’m not really sure. This was a pivotal moment?
Mr. Rubin: It was really the clincher in many ways. I talk about it in Don’t Burn This Book that I had several other awakenings over the course of a couple of years.
There were several other moments that I thought something’s not right with the Left. I had been piecing it all together. And then I did this sit down with Larry and I still considered myself of the Left. You can watch videos that I was doing, there on YouTube still, where I was talking about again, we’ve the Lefties have to fix liberalism.
We have to stop acting so illiberally, this has nothing to do with the liberalism that I know, the JFK liberalism. What’s happening to this?
And then I sat down with Larry and he was one of the first really sort of tried and true I would say, I was going to say conservatives, but he’s really more of a small L libertarian to conservative something in there. But certainly not a Lefty. Let’s put it that way.
I sat down with him and I treated him exactly how I would treat all my guests, which is what I always do, which is the same way you do it with a decent amount of respect and an open mind and a hope that there’s going to be some sort of interesting discourse.
I said to him, most people have seen this already because it’s gone viral so many times. But in essence I said, well, tell me about systemic racism. I think what Lefties often do is you say something and just by the nature of you saying it, you think it means it’s true.
Larry just flipped it on its head and he started rifling off statistics about police brutality and affirmative action and the Black family and a whole series of other things. What became such a meme worthy moment was that I really listened to him.
I was sort of not ready to be in that fight because I wasn’t armed with facts. He was. And then subsequently I went on my own journey. I went down that path to see where that path would lead.
I went from, okay, I talked to Larry Elder, well, maybe I could talk to that Ben Shapiro guy now and maybe I could talk to Dennis Prager and Glenn Beck. Before I realized it, I go well, these guys aren’t that bad. They know what they think and why they think about it.
They think about life seriously and I may have some political differences with them, but they relish in that. That’s why the moment I think became so important and it has caused so many other people to wake up because they got to see me do it in real time.
Mr. Jekielek: Why is it do you think that folks aren’t willing to do the listening that you did? Folks in maybe a similar position, or are they in a similar position?
Mr. Rubin: I think some people are willing to. Unfortunately politics has become so frayed and it’s so everywhere now it’s infected everything.
You turn on a comedy show, it’s political. You turn on ESPN, it’s political. Politics is just everywhere, which is to me, a sign of something that’s very unhealthy in the system.
A good political system, you wouldn’t have to talk about it that often because it wouldn’t be affecting your daily life very much. That’s what’s so dangerous about this last year and a half is that we already had big government in America. Now we have governments that can say you’re going to lock down and stay in your house. We’re going to give you more money not to work, et cetera, et cetera.
Government has gotten bigger in all of this. It looms larger in all of our lives. Every late night show it’s politics 24/7. I think a lot of people are willing to listen. I think that it’s a little bit of chicken and egg. Maybe there weren’t enough hosts that were willing to have a humble moment. And for whatever reason I was willing to do that.
Mr. Jekielek: I think it’s very rare for most hosts to have humble moments. I haven’t seen many. I think that’s one of the reasons you probably got so much play.
Mr. Rubin: I suppose that is true. I was a player in that play so it’s hard for me to analyze it in that regard. But I just did what I thought was right. That really is the truth.
When I went back into the control room and I discussed it with my guys and immediately the producer said, oh, we’ll cut it. Don’t worry about it. We’re not going to leave it in. I just said, no, if this is what I’m doing as a living, if I believe in open discourse, if I really want to hear what people think, well, then I can’t take out the parts where people know something more than I do and are more aware of what’s going on and remove statistics.
If it had been a personal fight, if he had said something personally attacking me, then maybe we would have edited it. But probably not that too.
But in this case, I thought that was the real moment. If you’re going to take the real moment out, well then what are you doing really? Hopefully people will watch this and feel that there’s something enlightening here, something worth listening to, et cetera.
But if there was really like a great two minute riff that I went on that for whatever reason happened to go against whatever your political beliefs might be, and by the way, I think you’re a pretty decent interviewer because I’m not that well-versed in all of your beliefs. You strike me as someone that’s curious and honest and wants to have a conversation, which is what an interviewer is supposed to do.
But if there was a moment where I just went on a two minute riff, that was really counter to what you believe, I suspect you would leave it in. I guess that’s what we need more of.
Why more people aren’t open to it, it’s partly humility on behalf of the host. And then it’s just the general sort of hyper partisan political thing where everyone wants to be right all the time nobody ever wants to be seen as wrong or mistaken. We’re humans with sometimes we’re wrong and mistaken.
Mr. Jekielek: I do think you’re right. I do think there’s this sort of idea that you can’t demonstrate being wrong. Certainly among politicians. It’s very unusual to see that.
I remember interviewing Ron DeSantis about lockdowns and so forth. Him saying he felt that he hadn’t made a good decision about locking down for the brief time that they did. That was very remarkable to a lot of people that he would say that.
You said that politics has kind of become a religion this morning. I remarked on that. I hadn’t quite thought about it that way, but if it is a religion, it doesn’t strike me as a good religion.
Mr. Rubin: No. Well, it has the markings more of a cult than a religion in a certain way. Right now what’s happening in the country where suddenly you can’t say that there are biological differences between males and females. Something that we all know to be true.
We’re suddenly debating whether capitalism is a better economic system than communism. Something we all know to be true. We’re debating whether the founding documents of the United States are good or bad. Something we all know that they are good, not bad.
But the reason for that is the Left has come in with a really horrific set of totalitarian ideas that in many ways, act as a cult. If you don’t agree with the 10 things that comes out of the woke Left right now, the second they decide what they are, you’re out. They’re purging an awful lot of people.
That sort of mugged liberal, either you bow to it or you’re sort of held hostage to it, or you might do what I did and go, oh, there’s something over there. I see a lot of scorched earth over here, but I see a lot of fertile ground over there. That’s much more interesting to me.
Some of the markings also of a cult would be that you can’t get out. Well, you really can’t get out with these guys. They will try to destroy you and mob you and take your job. This is what cancel culture is. You’re also in many religions and cults you’re born guilty. In this case, White Christian men are born guilty of the Left by their logic. Not by my logic, of course.
What I would like to do is get people out of that cult, but I would just say one other thing on this, which is that the constant obsession with politics as if it’s the sum totality of what existence is all about is very dangerous for everybody.
Joe Biden is not going to solve your problems. And by the way, Donald Trump’s not going to solve your problems. That’s not to say all politicians are equally bad, but the answer really comes from you. It comes from your local community. It comes from a bottom up way of looking at the world. It does not come because Joe Biden signed an executive order.
Mr. Jekielek: You experienced as you started reaching out publicly to people outside of the accepted circle I guess four or five years ago, you experienced some kind of early days cancellation, right? Has that changed at all? Is it just kind of accelerated, is it now on steroids? What has changed in this time from what you’ve seen?
Mr. Rubin: I would say when it first happened, when I first started talking about, oh, there’s something wrong with the Left and then being willing to have a conversation with some of the guys I just mentioned, suddenly I was getting all these hit pieces written about me that I’m a white supremacist.
It’s always some white version of something. It was coming from HuffPo and it was coming from Vox and the New York times. All of these places that I at one time I thought were decent outfits of journalism.
At first it really bothered me because nobody wants to see in print that they’re a white supremacist or that they’re the worst thing in the world, or have my dad who still subscribes to the New York Times, open up the New York Times and they did a ridiculous article about how YouTube leads people to the alt-right with a big picture of my face.
Nobody wants to see these things. And of course, because they’re not true. They’re actually completely counter to that. Everything that I talk about on the show, every idea that I promote in my book is counter to the collectivist ideas that would be thought of as white supremacist or something like that, or racist or bigoted.
But what’s interesting to me is that while at first I used to have to defend myself and then I’d get into Twitter wars with people and I’d have a lot of people backing me up. What’s interesting is now it still happens just in the last few weeks the New York Times implied that I was that I host white supremacists, which in essence is calling me a white supremacist.
Well now what I realized is my fans usually defend me and I can step back. When they say that about me, when I see that in the New York Times, the heart rate doesn’t change, the blood pressure doesn’t change because it’s like, oh, you guys are up to your same old games and I’m still here. Not only am I still here, I’m bigger, I’m better and I’m stronger than I was because I’ve been through the mill.
That being said, I get it when people are concerned about that. People don’t want to lose their jobs. It’s not fun to be flamed and mobbed on Twitter, but if you survive it, you will come out stronger on the other side. That’s the goal.
Mr. Jekielek: I’ve definitely heard this. Pretty much exactly this idea from multiple people that I’ve had on the show that have had this sort of thing happen. Where they say, well, it’s kind of like gives you an odd sense of empowerment once you’re on the other side because you’re like, well, okay, so I’ve been canceled.
Mr. Rubin: I’s also because it’s also patently ridiculous. The thing is I like criticism and I really mean this. I like genuine criticism. When I’ve had articles written about me that weren’t hit pieces, but were genuine, Dave’s good at this, but not good at this.
I may not agree with that, but I actually think if someone is thoughtful enough to watch a bunch of my interviews and say, maybe Dave should have followed up here with this question, or he didn’t ask this to this person or whatever it might be, that’s okay. That’s totally fine. First off, it’s your opinion and no one is above criticism. I like that.
What I don’t like is these absurd, ridiculous, over the top claims that I’m a Nazi and a bigot and all that. But when you get to that other side, and then you have your own base, your own supporters defending you, and then it’s like it’s kind of funny. You guys are still doing this. You New York Times, you place of journalism, which gets everything wrong all the time. You’re going to still go after me for this nonsense. You’re saying far more about yourself than you’re saying about me.
Mr. Jekielek: Why do you think there’s no self-reflection? No kind of looking back?
Mr. Rubin: Because liberalism has failed. That’s a very sad precept for me to say, it’s a sad notion for me to talk about it. My entire book is defending liberalism and I believe that classical liberalism in a healthy system is the best widest tent view of looking at the world.
Our system though is infected right now. Wokeism has infected the system and it is destroying everything. Let’s say the New York Times is always sort of Left, but it wasn’t bananas Left. There was a big plurality of opinion there and obviously Barry Weiss was there.
Barry Weiss, who’s a liberal, I mean, she’s a liberal, which doesn’t even really make sense to me anymore, but God bless her. She’s a liberal. She couldn’t even take it there anymore because there’s no Left far enough for the Left. There’s no woke enough for the wokesters.
They’re constantly purging people and as they do that purge, they’re going to destroy every institution that they let in.
ESPN goes woke. They start talking about race all day and then what’s the result? ESPN’s ratings are terrible. They’re in constant wars with their employees over who’s the most racist and should a Black person be on the sideline reporter at the NBA game and let’s get rid of that White girl.
I’m talking about the Rachel Nichols story from a couple of weeks ago that you may remember, and it infects every system that it’s in. The only systems that will survive are ones that don’t let it in, which probably are going to be very conservative systems or new systems that are going to have a better set of ground rules from the beginning.
Mr. Jekielek: Well, okay. That’s very interesting because there does seem to be this, and I talked with Naomi Wolf about this, and this is something that Peter Boghossian really captured my imagination with a while back in an interview we did where he basically set the Left-Right spectrum isn’t really interesting to me anymore.
Yes, I agree. The spectrum for me is cognitive liberty on one side and on the other side, well, whatever it is, I still haven’t quite figured out exactly what you call the thing on the other side.
Mr. Rubin: It’s cognitive liberty or sort of cognitive surrender. Something like that.
Mr. Jekielek: Yes. Exactly.
Mr. Rubin: Cognitive outsourcing. How about that?
Mr. Jekielek: Okay. That’s very interesting because at the idea that yes, you should be able to impose your beliefs or you’re happy with having someone else’s beliefs imposed on you, the collection of those people on this side and the people that believe that we should just be able to believe whatever we want.
There is something much bigger than conservative here. This seems like this group of, as you call it, the mugged by reality liberals, I think Naomi called it disaffected. I don’t know.
Mr. Rubin: Probably disaffected liberal or something like that. They need to be disinfected too. That’s a different thing. But that thing is interesting to me. I’ll tell you this. Next week we’re going to announce the title of my next book.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s get some hints here.
Mr. Rubin: I’ll give you a hint. I think I’m dropping this for the first time. I’m not going to give you the title because I haven’t been sworn to secrecy by the publisher, but I will tell you that at one time I wanted the book to be called the Future Conservative because my thought was the future conservative, there were two that I liked.
I liked the Modern Conservative and the Future Conservative and my feeling was I wrote a book defending liberalism. I believe that the ideas that I put forth in that book are the correct ideas.
I believe those are the ideas that America was founded on, but now we need to move into something broader where the traditional religious conservative, say the more liberty minded, liberal, ex-liberal, whatever you want to say, even the neo-con, the Trump people, the anti-Trump people, were all sort of roughly on the same side.
We believe in individual rights. We believe that America is fundamentally good. Yes. We might disagree on some tax stuff. We might disagree on foreign policy, but we all basically believe that the thing that’s been going on here for 250 years is pretty good.
Then you have the wokesters and everything else that’s going on in the Left and they are here to destroy everything. I see that as a much bigger enemy right now. What I would like to do is keep the alliance. We can use an X-Men reference or an Avengers reference, or we can do a Lord of the Rings thing.
I would like an alliance of people that think some different things to say, you know what, you’re more religious, this person happens to be gay. You don’t believe that drugs should be legal, this person believes that marijuana should be legal. But those are not the structural issues that are under assault right now.
There is a structural issue under assault, which is the very foundation of America. Let’s put that stuff aside. Let’s be the best of ourselves. Let’s argue that stuff out and I think there’s a real opportunity for that on the Right.
That’s why in many ways, the crazier that the Left goes, it’s good for everybody. As long as don’t burn the whole thing down because it is waking up people in droves. Someone like Naomi, who I chatted with a little bit yesterday, she’s waking up.
But you know, you don’t wake up like this in most cases. Very few people do. Candace Owens was a former Lefty. She woke up like this. Most people, it’s a slow awakening. It’s a shocking awakening. It’s awake, slumber, awake slumber and then finally an awakening. You have to make room for all of those people.
Mr. Jekielek: You’re going to be announcing your book and then you’re going to disappear for a month?
Mr. Rubin: Yes. That’s how we’re doing it. On July 30th, I go off the grid for a month. This’ll be the fifth year that I’m doing it. No phone, no iPad, no computer, no TV, no news, no current events, nothing. I’m going to disappear for a month. I do nothing technological. I’m going to catch up on some reading. I’m going to sit on the beach and go into an undisclosed location.
And then I come back on September 1st and Adam Corolla, comedian Adam Carolla is going to host the show and he’ll do about two hours bringing me back with everything that I missed. For all I know, Joe Biden’s brain will have exploded, America will be under the communist regime who knows what will happen this year? COVID will be locked down.
Mr. Jekielek: Wait, wait, wait. There’s going to be no communist regime in America in a month’s time.
Mr. Rubin: All right. You’re a dreamer. You’re an optimist. You’re an optimist. You’re an optimist. Yeah. We’ll see what happens. But yeah, I’m going to announce the book on the 30th and then I have a couple of big announcements related to my tech company, locals.com that we’re going to make that day and then I disappear. It’s a nice way to go off the grid.
Mr. Jekielek: You started five odd years ago, probably just to protect yourself from attack or something like this, right?
Mr. Rubin: I had been under a lot of stress. It was sort of a joke in a way. Can I do it? It was something so crazy. I was just like, can I do it? And then on the other hand, I realized that it was something that I needed in a certain way.
The stress, I can joke about it now because everything’s okay. But the stress of the hate and the mobs and all of those things, it did take a toll on me. I talk about it in the book that I developed an autoimmune disorder called alopecia areata I lost literally about 40% of my hair. I was spraying in hair and powder and all. And then I took some very experimental medication that caused all sorts of other physical problems.
But then I realized if I’m going to be in this game, if I’m going to do this, I better figure out a way to de-stress properly. That was part of why I started doing this and as you probably know, I don’t tweet on the weekends.
I try not to take my phone into my bedroom because the last thing that you do at night, shouldn’t be looking at Twitter. And the first thing that you do in the morning, shouldn’t be seeing what your comments are. I’ve tried to figure out a way to give myself a little room in this digital landscape that we live in.
Mr. Jekielek: Exactly. And that’s what I wanted to talk. What has been your kind of experience of being descreening? Like you, I spend all my time on screens basically. But you’re actually spending a month a year with no screens, like actually.
Mr. Rubin: Literally no screens, which it can be very difficult at times too, because even if you put all your stuff away, if you’re a functioning member of society, unless you’re going to hide out in a basement, if you go to the burger joint, they usually have a TV. You go to the gym, there’s TVs everywhere, all of those things.
I really had to figure out ways to just avoid all of those things. Ironically last year, 2020 was the easiest year to do it because of lockdowns. I was pretty much just at home the entire time. That actually made it quite easy. This year will definitely be more challenging and because I’m running other businesses now that’s going to be challenging as well. But that’s the point. That’s the point.
I know I have the luxury because I have a great team around me and an assistant and people that’ll take care, make sure my businesses don’t crumble without me and make sure that I’m ready to be back when I’m back and all sorts of things like that.
But I find it to be, it’s a transcendent time. There’s always a time I would say about halfway through where it’s just like, wow, the brain has calmed down. Your perspective changes, patience, I’m pretty cool wired as is, but like I feel calmer. If I go to the store, I’m a little more friendly with, let’s say with the cashier or something. We don’t know the way these things are infecting us and affecting us and that’s why I do it.
Mr. Jekielek: Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to issue a challenge to myself, to our producer over here and also to, well, I’m going to do a very simple challenge though and actually to our viewers because I have a suspicion that this is something that’s been very helpful to you over the last few years. Even for a day, I think it might be difficult for some of us. That’s my challenge. That’s my challenge to myself, to our producer here and to our viewers. Take a day.
Mr. Rubin: One day. I’ll issue you a challenge. My challenge to you is you don’t have to do it this Saturday because you’re on the road right now, but maybe next Saturday or that first Saturday that I go off that grid, just take the day. Just you, Friday night just put your phone downstairs and just forget about it and just don’t get back on until Sunday morning.
Guess what? Yes, you’re going to go to your pocket often. You’re going to get phantom buzzes. You’re going to wonder did some story happened that I have to talk about, but you will be okay. And not only will you be okay, you will be better. You will realize at some point during the day that it is incredibly freeing to live just as we lived remarkably 20 years ago.
Mr. Jekielek: Because you know what I’m thinking right now, it’s going to be like the biggest story of the decade.
Mr. Rubin: Of course. But you know what? Even if that happens, you know what you realize no matter what the world goes around and it’s going to come around again and you will be okay, I promise you. You will be okay.
Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to invite our guests or our audience actually, that’s watching to put in the comments, if you do this, I want you to tell me what it did for you. And I’ll do the same. I’ll do a follow-up.
Mr. Rubin: I have never once spoken to someone that tried it for a day, or sometimes I can get my locals community to do it for a weekend. Something like that. I’ve never spoke to one person one time who said, boy, that was terrible. Everybody says it’s great. Everybody says it’s great.
And by the way, I’m not sitting here saying these things are horrible. I have all my problems with big tech that you are well aware of. We all have our addictive scrolling on Twitter. You often do something called doom scrolling where you’re just looking for something negative.
Webpages used to end. Remember the old internet where a webpage you’d click on something and then you’d get to the end of the page and then you’d have to click back. Well, now most web pages have endless scroll. You just go and go forever.
You open up Netflix, it scrolls forever. You go to YouTube search, it scrolls forever. They’re keeping us in this rat race constantly. I don’t think that’s very good for the human brain. I have a feeling that anyone that took some time off of these things might connect with something that we used to know that we’re starting to forget right now.
Mr. Jekielek: I love that. Let’s talk about big tech for a moment. One of the reasons we started epoch TV, I mentioned this a number of times, but I’ll talk about it here as well and probably has to do with how you start with locals as well.
I found myself thinking, can I even cover this issue? This is something I feel this is really important, but if I cover it, YouTube is my main form of marketing basically for this show. What if they cut the video? What if they deplatform me? I thought that’s crazy. I can’t be thinking this.
Anyway, we have a platform. You have a platform. You’re still on YouTube? I use it mainly for just teasers and things like that. But do you find yourself self-censoring?
Mr. Rubin: A little bit. Look, I interviewed president Trump about a month ago and he said two or three lines. I think it was three sentences that added up to something around 37 seconds that we felt if we put on YouTube, they could give us a strike. The way the YouTube world works you get three strikes and you’re out.
But in essence, once you have one strike, you can’t live stream anymore and then next thing you know, they could just blow up your channel. What we did was we played the interview as is, I don’t like to edit, but we did put soundbars over those three sentences.
And then I put the full thing on locals.com and it’s completely unedited. And if you want to join and listen then you can. There is a pay wall, it’s subscription-based. But I do believe that that a little bit of money, a little bit of skin in the game is worth it.
We charge $5 a month for my locals community, but the minimum you can charge on locals is two. It’s up to you as the creator to set whatever you want to set. But a few other times in the last few weeks, I did have some moments where other guests brought up election fraud related things. And I have to sit there thinking, especially if we’re doing it live, look, we’re only there by the grace of YouTube.
They could pull the plug on us at any moment. That’s not a great way to run a business or live a life. Believing that you are just Left to the arbitrary whims of some giant tech company, right? That’s not good. That’s exactly why I started local. I love that you guys started a TV thing. I love that human ingenuity out there and people taking these issues seriously and innovating. It’s a beautiful thing. That’s what humans do.
Mr. Jekielek: Absolutely. But what the expectations are on these big platforms actually keeps changing. It seems like it’s a moving target.
Mr. Rubin: It’s completely amorphous. Nobody knows what the rules are. Nobody knows when the rules are going to be enforced, nobody knows who’s enforcing the rules and nobody knows if they’re going to be enforced the same way the next day.
This is a series of like completely insane ways to run businesses and to actually be able to communicate information properly.
Of course, the other part related to mainstream media or the corporate press, whatever you want to call them is they get so many things wrong or things that they tell us one way that we find out our true later. There’s this whole meme of misinformation right now.
Joe Biden doesn’t want us spreading misinformation. Jen Psaki is telling social media companies not to allow misinformation on their platforms.
Well, all right. You don’t want misinformation on your platforms. Well, remember when Brett Kavanaugh was a rapist for several months and that all turned out to be untrue? Remember when the Covington kids were racist? Remember when Jessie Smollett was almost lynched? Trump and Russia.
The litany of things, that doesn’t even talk about COVID what’s gone on with things that were true one day and not true the other day and masks work and they don’t work in lockdowns.
It’s like, we’d all have to ban everybody. Everybody in essence would be banned if there was any sort of consistent thought here and there just simply isn’t. There shutting the lights on us, my friend. They have had it. Big tech and big light, but they don’t like it.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s finish up. We’ve never said the name of your book. Don’t Burn This Book. I really enjoyed reading it. I think the last time we interviewed was specifically about the book. I just wanted to make sure that people know what book we’re talking about.
Mr. Rubin: I appreciate it. Very professional.
Mr. Jekielek: What is the name of the next one, again?
Mr. Rubin: I can’t tell you. I will announce it in a few days. It was almost the Future Conservative, but I think you will like the title.
Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts?
Mr. Rubin: Well, it’s always good to see you and I’m glad you guys are doing good work. I just loved anybody that, when I come to events like this and I see people that over the course of years, they’re still in the game still going. It’s like, that’s what it’s all about.
I mean this for anybody that’s watching this that whatever it is that you want to do in life, whether you want to be a guy in a nice suit with a microphone, or whether you want to start a restaurant or you want to own a bowling alley, it’s like, do it.
Go out there and do it. If we had more of that spirit, we wouldn’t be so reliant on the government and I think that would be the answer to a lot of the problems.
Mr. Jekielek: Well, Dave Rubin, it’s such a pleasure to have you on again.
Mr. Rubin: Always great to see you.
