Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Brian Keating & Dave Rubin — DON’T BURN THIS BOOK: using free speech to avoid a Sci Fi dystopia (#042)

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

   Brian Keating interviews Dave Rubin (The Rubin Report) on the most interesting issues of the day: free speech and expression, classical liberalism, lessons from Jordan Peterson, and the imperative of tolerance. More about Dave Rubin: https://daverubin.com/ Find Dave on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/RubinReport Get Dave’s book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason: https://amzn.to/2KCurtT  00:01:00 The mellifluousness of the Long Island accent! 00:05:00 Coming out of the Closets: first as a gay man, and then as a classical liberal 00:12:07 The Exclusive story of how Dave named the book and designed the cover 00:21:00 Shadow Banning: the new normal? 00:23:11 Are we running out of time to defend liberalism? 00:26:46 Is there a danger in overblowing your message? 00:30:00 Similar messages like Michael Shermer’s https://youtu.be/5dGzMTdfsic 00:34:36 Digital Detox: why and how? 00:41:02 Jordan Peterson: what do you do when your mentor struggles? 00:47:43 Are you worried about getting too popular? 00:52:53 High-Performance Public Speaking 00:57:57 Would you rather have a 1,000 readers now or 1 reader in a 100 years? 00:59:10 Would you rather have fans or haters read your book? 00:59:51 What are you most pessimistic about? 01:01:09 What advice would you give your 20-year-old self? 01:03:16 Can creativity be taught? Dave’s journey from a left-leaning progressive to a free-thinking classical liberal has been quite an adventure. As a gay married man in America, Dave spent the majority of his adult life subscribing to a certain political belief system based primarily on his immutable characteristics. Fed up with the mainstream media narrative and click-bait news, Dave decided to open up about his awakening, for all to see. He came to realize that no person or idea should be expected to join a side, but rather they should embrace their status as an individual. He now feels that political correctness and groupthink are reaching dangerous levels, distracting us from the true American dream of the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. Dave’s background as a stand-up comedian, degree in political science, and willingness to listen without fighting has uniquely positioned him to tackle big ideas and uncomfortable truths with thought leaders from both sides of the aisle. His show The Rubin Report aims to create civil discourse with people we both agree and disa Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Five, four. Dave Rubin, welcome to the Into the Impossible podcast, production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. Brian, it's good to be with you. I'm looking forward to chatting. Yeah, I've been a fan of yours for many years now, followed you for a long time, and I want to get into all that. And, of course, your fantastic new book, which I had a chance to devour this weekend. And that's pretty high praise, given all the other. stuff going on in life. So first I want to start off with, uh, with, uh, you know, just a quick,

uh, question for you. And, and, and that is, uh, you grew up in Long Island, as did I. Oh, all right. Where are you from? What time? I'm from Stony Brook. So I grew up in Stony Brook. The real island, we're talking Suffolk County here. And what about you? I am, I am a child of Nassau County. Ah, okay. We're, we're sort of enemies, but let's see if we can work it through over the next hour. Exactly. They're the nicest friends to real Long Islanders ever. How'd you lose the accent? Did you go? Did you have the surgery too like I did? You know what's funny is people always say to me that I sound more like I'm from the Midwest or usually what they say to me is I sound like yogi, yogi bear or Fazi or something like that. I don't, this is just the way I've

always spoke, but I never had that real hardcore Long Island accent. Although there are a few words, you know, I say orange juice. Most people say orange juice. And what do you put your pencil? in at your desk when you slide it out. Draw. Draw. But I say draw. It's a draw. We drop the R's at the end.

But I've been slowly trying to fix some of that stuff. But I have a great affinity to actually, to like the New York, that real New York accent, that real Jersey accent. I'm re-watching the Sopranos right now in the midst of quarantine also. And there's something about that, it's not just the way they speak in terms of the tone, but there's like a real feeling to it. There's like a real, like you're really conveying something with the language. And I do love that.

Yeah, I would say Long Islanders are the Canadians of New York. Nobody doesn't like Long Islanders, right? So except our hockey team. Well, I want to get to the book. I want to talk some big picture stuff. You probably don't know this, but this show is pretty apolitical. And I like to keep it that way because I feel like there's so much politics and the work that you do and our mutual friends do on both sides of the aisle.

But I also feel like, you know, we need a safe space from politics in the sense that we need sports or entertainment to largely be free of it. So I like to give this, and I always give my little spiel is that, you know, there's no, the reason I like astronomy is that there's no, like, Republican comets and, you know, democratic constellations. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

So, although, yeah, we may be going there. Space Force has its chance. So I wanted to just, you know, start off with that. We'll get into politics inevitably because, I think that's a big function of your book and in your role in society as an influencer and a media tighten over your empire there. But first I wanted to say the book starts off with a lot of really personal details, which, you know, I'm sure we're, you know, a little bit unnerving perhaps to do, especially as a

first time author, you know, to come out with your first book and then to really spill your guts. And, you know, Henningway used to say allegedly that the job of a writer is to sit in front of a typewriter and bleed. And I wonder, you know, when you're going through this, since you have experienced so much of the good and we'll get to the good and the bad, obviously later, but was that something you were, you know, kind of, you know, you had any trepidation about, you know,

being so personal, the book is really endears the reader because you are so personal and candid about your life's affairs. Yeah, so I will answer your question. But quickly, I just want to hit what you said there about a safe space and that not everything should be so political and all that because I think it's an important part. And actually, that's really how I end. That's chapter 10 of the book in many ways.

You know, it's funny because I don't like the idea of safe spaces within a university context where we're going to protect kids from dangerous ideas. I actually think that's completely antithetical to learning and every reason that they should be on college campuses. However, the spirit of what you just said there, that we should have spaces where politics, especially partisan politics, don't leak into everything. That is deeply, deeply important because we live in a time in the last five years where politics has leaked into everything to the point that you know that if you turn on ESPN and you're watching

Sports Center, most likely there's something political happening. You're very rarely watching, well, now we're watching no sports highlights, but even without Corona. Before that, it was about identity politics. It was about racism. It was about standing for the flag or sitting for the flag or a series of other things. And we desperately do need those places to have sports or culture or art or science, things that we can discuss that have nothing to do with the political world. So I just want to put that out there that I love that, generally speaking. As to specifically to your question, that was the hardest part for me. When I started writing this and when I signed the deal originally, and I mentioned this right

at the top of the book, I was going to write why I left the left. And that's a phrase that has become attached to me because of a Craigor-U video that I did a couple years ago. It has something like 20 million views. And I was going to write, I was a lefty. Now I'm not a lefty. here's what happened. And as I was writing that, I started realizing I didn't want to just write a book about what I'm against. I want to write a book that's about what I'm for. And that's really what

don't burn this book became. And then through that, this was and is my first book, as you said, you know, as I discussed things with my editor and we tried to, you know, piece together something that would, you know, make cohesive sense and take, take everybody on a journey and not just be sort of like bang bang like plow through everything in in one very linear shot it became more and more obvious that I had to include some of the personal stuff in yeah so you know I think one of the things that I did pretty effectively is I'm trying to get people out of the political closet because I really do believe that exists I think there are good decent people who refuse to say what they think not because they're racist or bigots or haters or anything like that but just because

the positions they hold are a little outside of the woke opinion of the day, and they're afraid that the mob's going to come get them. So I liken that to what it was like to be in the closet sexually. And I think that there's actually a tremendous amount of overlap there. And I think that's going to be one of the things that I think will be most effective in showing people why you have to come out, because it's very hard to live one life. It's hard to live one life that makes sense, that gives you purpose and a little bit of joy and all that stuff. Yeah, authentic and you and all that. That's really hard to do.

As a matter of fact, it's your job as a person to do it, to do it. And most of us shirk that responsibility. But now try to do it as two people, as three people, as four people. And the more that you're in the closet for whatever it is, your sexuality, your political thoughts, whatever, a family secret, whatever you're in the closet for, whatever you hide to yourself and don't show the world, it'll end up owning you. And I think a lot of people are seeing some version of that right now. So I tried to go into the personal stuff as much as possible. I will tell you this. The only chapter that we ended up cutting from the book was when I really, really did a deep dive into some further personal stuff.

And I think I'm going to ultimately save that for another book. Because the trick to this was trying to write something personal, but also that really was, the real reason was to highlight the ideas. So, you know, there's always that balance. I think probably most authors have to deal with some version of that. That's right. Yeah, I mean, it struck me as I was reading that. And yeah, you're very candid, as I say, about, you know, coming out of the closet. And, you know, the first thing that struck me is, you know, for a comic, you got pretty lousy timing because we came out on 9-10, 2001.

Yeah. The eve before September 11, the awful events. And then this book is out during the greatest crisis, you know, of our lives in many ways. It's like, what happens with your timing there? You know, I kind of. There is. Next time you make a major life decision, Dave, you've got to let us know a little bit ahead of time. I should be playing the markets better if I have this incredible power.

No, it's actually true. I mean, technically it was 9-11 because it was 1230 a.m. on 9-11. So literally just, you know, about seven hours before the attacks. And I lived in New York City at the time and I was in the Times Square subway station. I'm sure many of your viewers can picture the exact spot right where the, the shuttle train that goes from Times Square to Grand Central. I was standing right there with my buddy. He lived in Queens.

I lived on the Upper West, so we were saying goodbye. And I came out to him, which was the first person that I had come out to. And then seven hours later, America was under attack. And it truly, that truly damaged me. You know, like I had held what I thought was this horrific secret in for so long. And then I finally released it into the universe. And next thing I know, America's under attack. And not just America's under attack,

the city I live in, is under attack. And it true, I mean, it sounds crazy, but it did some serious damage to my psyche. Yeah, I'm sure it did. And, you know, I think a lot of people are probably grappling with this, you know, we're 20 years younger, you know, basically the same age, roughly you were at that time. And going through this is going to be the same kind of cathartic experience. And, you know, I only hope that people can deal with it and get the mental help that they need and deal with, you know, the self-care, et cetera. And I want to get into that because you have so many good tips, you know, the Arthur, this podcast, the End to the Impossible Podcasts,

about high achievers, high performers, and kind of how you get to this level of intellectual, you know, the style, the techniques, the tactics that you use to get to this, you know, really, really prominent level. But I think people can also learn a lot from the personal. And I think that's, that's, you're to be commended for that. I do want to talk about the book starting off. You know, it's got blurbs from, you know,

I call it the usual crew of kind of the blog, Spirics that you associate with, Ben Shapiro, your mentor, Jordan Peterson. I do want to spend some time on him and many other luminaries. But one that surprised me. It might surprise some of our listeners and the readers is from Eckertoli. And he said, Dave Rubin is bridging America's great divide. He reminds us that, while we might not always agree with the quote, other, we need to listen, capital letters to them. Ruben has mastered the vital skills of listening and asking questions that do not serve an ideological agenda. I think a lot of times you're unfairly, you know, portrayed in this light in the media that you're just, you know, or the right

wing or, you know, you're kind of whatever the analog is for, you know, betraying one's, one's class that they're supposed to be representative of. I think you do a wonderful job of, actually, people do take the time to listen to you. They'll find out that you do have this, you know, catchphrase, of course, classical liberalism. I want to get into that. But, you know, As Eckertoli, who is this master, the author of the world famous bestselling book, The Power of Now, he's really like a spiritual guru. And the people that he's influenced are so diametrically opposed to say the other people on the cover. Not that I don't know anything about his politics. And I'm happy that I don't because I think we need this detox and hopefully we'll get into that.

But I do want to talk about the book. You've got a copy behind you. I got a digital copy and I really love reading it. you mentioned, you spend a little bit of time in the book talking about the process of writing the book and even the painstaking detail that you went in on the cover. And like you, and unlike the proverb, I judge books by their covers. And I think publishers do too, because it's the one thing authors are not allowed to have much control over, you know, they can have their say and so forth. But really, the publishers know this from, it's their livelihood to know that.

What does the cover mean to you? I want to, I want to share some feelings about what it meant to me, What does it mean to you? It's a unique and interesting cover. And they'll have a picture of it, obviously, in the video. Yeah. So as you know, I'm in the midst of doing a ton of press right now for this. And I'll drop something with you that I haven't dropped publicly elsewhere yet. This is exclusive. So there were several titles of the book. As I mentioned, why I left the left was the original working title. And on the deal that I signed, that's what it said it was going to be.

And then there was a day in New York. I was in New York for some meetings with the people at at Penguin Random House, and I was getting hit by the media for exactly what you just described. He's a right-wing maniac and all this stuff. And it's like, no matter how many times I lay out what my lefty cred is, you know what I mean? I describe in the book, I'm begrudgingly pro-choice. I happen to actually be gay married. I'm not just saying I'm for gay married. Right.

I'm for, right, we're in the process of surrogacy right now. I'm in, you know, I'm against the death penalty. I'm for some level of public education. I could lay out all of my lefty cred, but unfortunately, with the new woke sort of hysterical left that has arisen, there is no room for dissension over there. So people just associate me with the right, which I don't mind being associated with, by the way. I have found conservatives and libertarians, especially classical liberals and cap people, to be open and willing to agree to disagree. And there's such fertile ground to battle out ideas. And I love that.

I absolutely love that. What I don't want to do is I don't want to be called far right. I don't want to be called alt-right, things that the New York Times has called me and a bunch of other stuff. But anyway, I'm in New York City taking all these meetings with Penglin, and I had decided that I didn't want to do the why I left the left book. And then I'm suddenly getting hit by the media, and they're calling me far right and the rest of it. And I go into the meeting with Penglin and I said, you know what? I've got a new title for the book. I want to call it right-wing lunatic because my feeling was if this is what these people are going to say about,

me, why don't I write a book that's filled with common sense, filled with decent ideas, time-tested, churned ideas that spread freedom and liberty? And I'll embrace this thing that people are saying I am, a right-wing lunatic. So the head of Penguin said, they all kind of liked it. You know, I'm sitting at this big table, and they all kind of bouncing their heads up and down. And then the head of penguin says, well, instead of right-wing lunatic, why don't we call it the memoir of a right-wing lunatic? And that reminded me, do you remember there was a Chevy Chase movie in the 80s or early 90s called memoirs of an invisible man. Do you remember that movie? I always liked that movie. I liked the title. So I thought that was

it. And then I was like, you know what, if we're going to go that far, let's even add. And we were at one point going to call it the crazed rantings of a right-wing lunatic. And I left that meeting saying that's what the title is, because I thought we'll embrace it. It flips it on a tag. It will allow. Own your truth. It will allow me to go into interviews that maybe are hostile. and feel funny too because they're going to introduce me as, you know, the crazed ranting of a right-wing lunatic, and then I'll be able to just lay out some basic common sense stuff.

And yada, yada, yada, yada. To answer your question, I brought that idea home to my husband, and he could not believe that I was considering such a psychotic title. And then what happened was when we were mocking up all sorts of books and Penguin was doing it and we were, you know, playing around on Photoshop and stuff, One of the ideas we had, regardless of what the title was, was that we were going to have a red band around the book

that was going to say, don't burn this book, and that you'd have to rip that to open the book. And suddenly it just hit David, actually, to say, well, that should be the title of the book. And I loved it. I called my guys at CAA. They loved it. I called Jordan Peterson.

He loved it. And we went with that. I think it is really the right idea, because the point is that there's a lot of stuff in here that's going to make people angry. And I even make a point at one point in the abortion chapter, I end it by saying, you know, now that you all hate me, let's move on. But the point is, you shouldn't burn it. You don't have to love it. You don't have to love everything I write here. You don't know if to agree with everything I say here. But these are the ideas I'm presenting. And let's live in a calmer time when book burning, you know, done. That's sort of what I wanted to share with you, my impression of the book. And maybe it was, you know, subliminal or whatever. Or maybe it's colored by my, affinity for science fiction and being, you know, co-directing the Arthur C. Clark Center, which obviously Arthur C. Clark was a master of science nonfiction, but also science fiction,

2001. He master. Yeah. And one of my favorite books as a kid was Fahrenheit 451. And this is Ray Bradbury's classic book from the 1950s. And, you know, I don't think it's possible to spoiler a book that's that old. You know, if you have it's okay. I think it's okay.

I think you've been talking recently about The Matrix a lot on your show and you're like, Yeah, I don't even have to say spoiler earlier because you haven't seen it in 20 years. It's not going to be a spoiler for you. But that book, Fire 9451, is a dystopian novel that Ray wrote in the context of the McCarthy era book burnings that were going on or, you know, desires on the far right, literally, during the McCarthy era to burn books. And he thought of it as a commentary against that notion. It's allegedly the temperature he was told at which paper begins to burn. And the end of the book also kind, and again, no spoiler alerts needed, but, but the, the book concludes with a call, you know, a clarion call that people should, instead of burning books and having, you know, these buildings where books are burned, they should instead build a building filled with mirrors and so that society can look at themselves. And I think, you know, we're spending so much time nowadays, you know, looking in these black mirrors and you talk a lot about that.

And how does that tie into, you know, I thought it was sort of a nice callback to that. The book, you know, don't burn this book. It reminded me of that that this could be dystopian. You know, I don't think people are literally going to burn your book. But the notion of it as a psychological concept, I think, you know, there is a certain amount of hostility. But back then, as I said, it was really the McCarthy era, far right. And I wonder if you see that coming from these little black mirrors that we all have, does that now kind of manifest? itself in a completely different way, decentralized, you know, to spread out and how a society

interacts with it to effectively not burn but cancel this book, like don't cancel this book. That's a great question, and there's so much there. And I'm a big sci-fi guy, too. And so much of the way I view the world is because I don't want us to end in a dystopian future. I don't want the machines to take over from Terminator. I don't want to have to end up living on Mars like Total Recall or being the batteries. like in the Matrix or, or, you know, one of the beautiful things about Fahrenheit 451 is that many of the people that were doing the burning were secretly having thoughts that were free thoughts. That's right.

And in many ways, that caused them to do more burning because they had to hide their, you know, I mean, there's a very religious sort of repress yourself and then destroy the other sort of notion in that. I would say I'm very, you know, it's funny. I describe myself as a world-weary optimist. I don't think you could do roughly what I do for a living, meaning putting your thoughts out there, talking to people you agree and disagree with,

and being very public about what you think, if you didn't have some level of optimism, because the hope is that by doing all of this, taking the full gestalt of everything that I do, that maybe I'll have elevated the world a little bit. Maybe I will have done a little bit of what those incredibly kind words that Eckhart Tolle wrote about me, maybe a little bit of that will translate into the real world. But I am worried that

especially now, especially now as we are all trapped at home, and we still don't know how much longer we're going to be trapped at home, that the dystopian version of the future, in many ways, is coming true in front of us right now. We're all trapped at home. We all know that big tech has a endless cascade of problems, and yet we now are more reliant on big tech than ever. So a year ago, you were arguing, well, big tech should be regulated or we need more competition or whatever that might be, or the algorithms are coming to get us, or we have to worry about shadow banning or de-boasting or all of these things. If you were worried about that a year ago, you know, it's very interesting because very few people are talking about it now. And yet now, big tech and the world,

as it is, just pushed us all more into the matrix, right? We're in it now more than ever. You cannot, all of your communication, the way we are doing this is through the big tech pipes. You can't meet your friend for a beer right now. You can't go bowling with a couple of your buddies and talk about life. If you're a political, your presidential candidate, whatever you are, you can't hold a rally anymore. So big tech and the idea gatekeepers have way more control over us right this second than they did five weeks ago. That is a huge problem and something we have to be thinking about. What I keep tweeting is, we're all playing a fixed game and we're pretending that the rule

aren't fixed. We have no idea what big tech is doing to manipulate us to make our feeds seem this way or hide certain people or boost other people, but we know that they do it. You know, Twitter's terms of service actually has shadow banning as of January 1st of this year in their terms of service. They are telling us, we can suppress certain people and amplify other people. Now, if Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and the rest of it are the true highways of information and communication of the future, well, this is where I see a lot of conservative saying we need regulation then. Now, the libertarian side of me doesn't want to do that, and I started a tech company, Locals.com, that I think is doing a nice job of cleaning up some of this

mess. But these are the conversations we should be having right now, because any of the things that you care about, about science and open inquiry and free thought, right now they're super dependent on a couple systems that aren't that friendly to that state. stuff. And I think our eye is off the ball right now. We're sort of just not paying attention to it. And by the way, there's good reason that we're not. We're not because our immediate lives feel crazy. We can't go out. We're worried about going to the supermarket and making sure we've enough food in the house. And suddenly the big tech thing doesn't seem as important. But I think the longer this goes on and the after effects, the second and third order effects, I think are going

to be massive. And we should be thinking about it at the same time. Yeah. So another kind of thing that came to mind as I look at your book and read through it as, you know, also involves burning and heat and, as I'm sure you're familiar from your extensive studies of the laws of thermodynamics, which state that the... Oh, yes. The second law... Only when I'm not studying string theory, my friend. That's right.

Well, we need all the stringiness we can get nowadays. So the second law of thermodynamics in particular says that the entropy or chaos or disorder of a system, you know, cannot decrease over time. It can only go in one direction. And, you know, in the book and in the publicity for the book, you talk about liberalism, and you say defend liberalism while you still can. Time is running out to defend individual rights, limited government, and free expression. So, you know, given that the law of, you know, conservation or the law of second law of thermodynamics

is that things are going to get more and more chaotic, is it really, you know, concomitant with that that we can't go back if we lose these freedom of speech rights, we enjoyed today. That's a good one. There's a lot there. This is where, are you familiar with Michael Malice by any chance who I've had on the show a couple times? I've heard him on your show, but I'm not, I don't recall exactly that.

So Michael Malice is what I would describe as sort of a extreme libertarian, sort of like an ANCAP type. And his constant argument is just that, that the thing's always spinning out of control and that conservatives even really aren't conserving. They're just sort of slowing the speed limit along the way to chaos, let's say, something like that. I've sort of come around to that general belief, but it doesn't mean that it's not a reason to do it. I think we have to preserve good ideas for as long as we can. The 200 plus years of the United States have been some of the freest, most prosperous years that humanity has ever seen.

Actually, all of them, all of the years have been. And more people from more walks of life come to the United States and flourish and still do to this day. And even right now, as a certain set of people in the United States scream that Hitler is in charge, which is absurd, nobody leaves. They don't leave. And one of the things is that if you wanted to leave under Hitler, he wouldn't let you leave, right? That caused a lot of debts. Trump's not forcing anyone to stay, and people still do want to come here. And the reason for that is that the ideas of classical liberalism, the idea of individual rights. Everyone is treated the same under the law. It doesn't mean that some people aren't born with more. It doesn't mean that some people aren't born luckier. It doesn't mean that some people

won't work harder or a series of other things that make up the human experience. But equal laws, which by the way, as brilliant as our founders were and as incredible and revolutionary, truly, as our founding documents were, it doesn't mean it was all perfect at the time, right? We had slaves, and then we freed the slaves. Women couldn't vote. And then, could vote. We had Japanese internment temporarily. I mean, we've done bad things, but the arc has consistently, always, with virtually no exception, the arc has always bent towards more true justice for more people. Now, I don't mean social justice. I mean justice in terms of equality of opportunity. That's what we have right now. But we are running out of room to defend

it. Because look, right now, right now, regardless of what you think about, how we should be on lockdown or quarantine or regardless of what you think about coronavirus as a whole. Right now, the Fourth Amendment, in effect, is suspended. We don't have the right to assemble right now. Now, we should be having a discussion about that. Can that go on forever in the name of public safety? I don't know exactly what the answer is there, but we should be talking about it, but very few people are talking about it. Right now, let's say you are a, let's say you thought coronavirus was a complete hoax and a government grab for power. I don't believe that. But should you be allowed to voice those opinions on social media without being banned?

And is that a violation of the First Amendment, even though social media companies aren't necessarily part of the government? Although there are a lot of ties there. I think that's certainly a conversation worth having. So all of these things lead to what your question is, which is if this thing is just spinning sort of more and more out of control. And right now it does feel like our system is in this odd place of, it feels like a jenga set, basically, our system right now. right precarious yeah and we're it's in a precarious place and by the way not just our system i don't you know i talk about a lot of this stuff through an american context but of course this is a worldwide situation right now um but what we have to be doing is defending the right

ideas when it's the hardest to defend them and and these are not you know the ideas that you just mentioned these are pretty simple things individual rights and limited government so that you can do what you're with your life what you wish this is pretty basic stuff and we just have to re-ignite that within. Yeah. Because I think when they understand it, they actually are drawn to it, which is a beautiful thing. What do you think about the rise of this movement, kind of a back reaction in some sense? Your book, Michael Shermer's book, How I had in the show last week, Giving the Devil is Due, and works, Ben Shapiro's book, that they kind of are really this full-throated advocacy

for things that we used to take for granted, you know, the First Amendment, you know, you're saying the Fourth Amendment, these aspects of the former America. And yet, you know, many of them, we don't perceive, you know, jackbooted thugs coming from Washington, D.C. I mean, it's pretty darn nice. I mean, California is, you know, if you have to be sheltering at home, it's one of the best places in the world, I think, to do so. Obviously, I haven't left.

The sun is shining today. I'm not complaining. Exactly, yeah. I mean, don't tell my boss, you know, Gavin Newsome that, you know, I'd work at the University of California even if he didn't pay me because I do love this place. So, you know, is there a danger and kind of overblowing, you know, with all these books, all these works, and as erudite as they are, that people are just not going to take it seriously because, you know, they look around their life. They say, there are no thugs, you know, cramming down, you know, disc pulling my Ethernet port. I don't have a million followers like Dave Rubin. So, you know, I mean, poor Dave Rubin, you know, he's going to have $9,000 because of shadow banning. Man, there's a lot there. You're nailing it with the question.

Sorry. No, no, no, you're giving me good. Two Long Islanders, you know, it's, no, I love it, though. No, I love it, though, because you're giving me the stuff that sort of lays right underneath the idea set, which is, which is, I think, what a good interviewer should do. So is there a risk in that that, because right now the government isn't running to our houses and stopping us, that maybe we're overblowing it or something like that. Well, my first answer would be that if you look at sort of this crew, some of the names that you just mentioned there, so Shapiro and Michael Shermer. And if you threw in Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson, we said we'll get to

and a few other people. What an interesting diverse group of thinkers. Now, these have, they happen to be white men. Some of them are straight. Some of them are gay. They could throw Heather McDonald in there, too. And no, when we can throw Heather McDonald, we could throw Ioniseli. We could throw Douglas Murray. We could throw Majid Nawaz. We could throw Thomas Sol. I mean, there's a million people. So I'm just giving you a couple names here, let's say. But what you have there is true intellectual diversity. So I'll even go with just the two, up top. So Shapiro and Shermer, Shapiro is an absolute believer. I mean, he believe, his worldview is an orthodox Jewish worldview. Michael Shermer is a skeptic. He's a former born-again

Christian, who is now an atheist and a skeptic. These guys shouldn't have that much in common, except in that their existential view of the world is completely different. But what they've realized is that as organic beings here on planet Earth right now, the rights that are protecting them to think completely differently are the rights of the individual and of basically of limited government. So I think something interesting has happened here where yes, and I talk about this in the book, by the way, that I am not worried. My major worry at the moment is not that the government is going to be the thing that comes and silences me. We should always be wary of that. And most bad things that have happened over time happened because of

bad governments. What I am more worried about is the average person that you're talking about who just sort of checks out. They just decide, I'm not going to say what I think because I don't want to deal with the social media mob. I don't want to deal with the BuzzFeed or Huffington Post Vox hit piece. And that what they will do is they will slowly disconnect their thoughts from their daily life. And then you sort of are just a robot. And then you're sort of very easily controlled. And that's what I'm worried about. So the premise of the question is a good one because, yes, is it more obvious when they go after a sort of bigger name? And then it's like, ah, you could watch that guy and be like, oh, so what?

He's not getting as many retweets as he used to. But that's not really what it's about. And the best example I can give you is why is it that virtually every week, media matters leads a campaign to get Tucker Carlson off the air? Now, I have no doubt that you have some disagreements with Tucker Carlson, politics. for sure, and I do too, by the way. I go on a show, I go on a show basically every week. He wants to intervene in big tech. I don't. That is a fundamental great place to have disagreement, and we do it respectfully. But there's a reason they're going after Tucker, and it's not just to shut down Tucker. It's to signal to all of the people who agree to Tucker, see, if we can get

him, we've got you. And that's why whenever they go after Tucker, I defend him. Because it's like, We need to signal to people that they can't destroy all of us. And that to me is, you know, we study imagination, curiosity, creativity here at the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. And, you know, one of the best, most delicious things you can do in life is have a respectful conversation. And with someone you don't agree with. If you're just talking in the echo chamber, you know, as a scientist, as a layperson, it's incredibly boring. I was talking with a friend on Saturday afternoon on a walk, six feet apart, of course, if you're listening, Gavin. And he was saying, you know, there's, it seemed to be, you know, almost like a law of physics,

you know, another, sorry to drop so much physics on you today, but I know, I dig it. I know a string theory master like you can handle it. Yes, yes, yes. I'm also working on the theory of everything, by the way. I should have it done by the end of the day. Oh, okay, good. Well, you might get scooped. I had a guest on yesterday who's already published his result. So we'll leave it, we'll leave it to you to co-publish. But he said, you know, I believe in sort of a concept of the conservation of outrage, which is that, you know, if you look back in the, in the, you know, 1400s when there were serfs and they would rebel against feudal lords, and it was outrageous, the mass populace against the very few gatekeepers. Then it was the protests against the divine

right of kings, you know, that came about the populace against the gatekeeper. Then it was, you know, the French Revolution, the aristocracy. Now it, and then it became Washington, you know, the, but now it's sort of the opposite. The gatekeepers have become this distributed, you know, mass. the net amount of outrage has to be maintained, just like energy cannot be created or destroyed. Outrage cannot be destroyed. You can't reduce it. Again, this one-way ratchet and Paul that cannot be reversed. And I wonder, you know, is that a symptom of what's going on in society as a whole that, yes, they may not come for you, you know, today because you're not Dave Rubin or, you know, listeners, not Dave Rubin, but tomorrow they may come for, you know, come for you. But, you know,

I think, I think looking at this need that people have and it's never been easier to communicate, and that's why one of the things I love most about your book is you basically go through this process of describing this very virtuous aspect of your life, which is called digital detox. And you take off the whole month of August as sort of a monthly sabbatical. And even you advocate doing it weekly as well. And I wonder, you know, one of your rules, though, you know, for life, to quote your mentor is, you know, to spend time with your physical, you know, neighbors in meat world, you know, in real life. But, you know, it's so hard to do that nowadays. In fact, it might be illegal in certain jurisdictions. So, I mean, I mean, this is such a crazy time.

But I wonder, can we talk a little bit about that? Because one of the, you know, as I said, I like there to be a politics free zone. I like this notion. And I'm also, you know, practicing Jew. I'm not as, I'm not as, I don't do Jew as much as Ben does, but, but the same token, it's incredibly important to my life, the meaning, my family, my children, my wife. How did this, you know, kind of come to you and have you seen the benefits? And what are the challenges to maintaining this, as I said, very virtuous, but it's, it is challenging. How do you maintain it? Give some tips to our listeners about how to do that, how to deal with it. Well, I'll first give a tip of the hat to the Jewish portion of this, which I am Jewish as well.

And I tweeted, you know, every now and again, I try to take the weekends off off of social media at least. So I'll still, right now in Corona in the last six weeks, I haven't been fully taking the weekends off. I've done some version of it because with the Ruben Report community, we watch a movie together and then we do a Zoom call and a few other things. It reminded me of that scene from, sorry, dude, they reminded me that scene from airplane, the movie Airplane where the air traffic controller, looks like I picked the wrong month to give up cocaine. Yeah, it looked like I'd pick the wrong week to stop. I think it's not August. It's not August for Dave Rubin. Right, exactly. Although I would do it right now if it was August, and I'm really looking forward to this August for many reasons. But, you know, sometimes on Fridays, as the day gets towards the end of the day, around 5 o'clock, I'll tweet out, you know, taking off for the weekend.

I'll see you all on Monday. And Shapiro has tweeted at me a couple times and say, you do know that the Jews have been doing this for about 5,000 years. It's called Shabbat. We're all Shummer Shabbas now. Right. So I tell him, I tell him, I'm doing an extended 48-hour Shabbat for the most. time for the most part now beats him on the weekends but my my real reasoning for doing this I so I've done three summers of August off the grid and when I did it the first time I really just wanted to try it it was just like wow my life has been so enriched by YouTube and Twitter and Facebook and all of this stuff and I and I get to do what I want for a living and I've started a successful company and I'm I have purpose and I'm doing something that I'm really proud of and it's it's often hard

and it comes with a lot of slings and arrows, as I write about in the book. But so much of my life is in this digital space. And as you referenced before with the Matrix, it's like the idea of the matrix, without giving the spoiler away, is that we are physical selves, our carbon-based selves, will become the batteries for the digital world. And in many ways, that is what's happening right now. The digital world is now looming larger in many ways than what it seems like our physical world is. And you can really see that in a day of correct.

We are spending more and more of our time staring into those black mirrors that you referenced. And I'm fascinated by that. So I thought three years ago, let me just take a summer, a month in the summer, because August is when things calmed down a little bit more, and let's see what happens. And I literally locked my phone in a safe, no TV, no nothing. The one thing that I did have was that my car does have GPS in it so I could still get places. I have a terrible sense of direction. But that really was it. And you know, what you quickly find is, you know, I was trying to avoid news. It's very hard to avoid news because wherever there is

a muted television, CNN is on. You go to, you go to the gym. You go to the gym and I'd have to wear a low hat and I do cardio looking like this because I, you know, they've got TVs up there. You go to a burger joint and CNN is on or ESPN is on. And I wanted to just avoid everything. And in the three summers that I've done it, I have managed to absolutely avoid everything. You know, fortunately, I have an assistant and people that work for me that make sure that if there were massive fires with the company, that things are taken care of. And the one thing that we do do is David does, my husband does a version of this with me, but doesn't really do it because he's running the companies.

But he'll try to only check his phone maybe once a night just to make sure everything's okay. So whatever, my point is that you don't need to set a rule. Like, I'm absolutely not going to touch anything and it's going to be for a moment. month and I'm going to avoid everything and all that. That's very, very hard to do. But I do say, you know, if maybe, you don't have to do a month, but maybe do from Christmas to New years. You know, everyone kind of shuts down at that time of the year. It's the time to be, it doesn't matter what religion you are. It's it's sort of time to be with family or shut down just the last week of the summer if you can. And if you can't do even either of those,

try it occasionally on the weekend, start for Saturdays maybe, and then add it to Sundays or the other way around. And I think what you will find is that it will give your brain a chance to reset. And I also offer some other little tips. Like, don't bring your phone into the bedroom. Yeah. The first thing that you do in the morning should not be looking at social media before you've brushed your teeth or had a glass of water.

And certainly the last thing that you do at night. And there are studies on this, by the way, because of the light, that it shouldn't be the last thing that you're doing. I mean, you should either read a book or tucker yourself out outside of your bedroom and then just go into your room to go to sleep. So I think all of these things, I'm not an expert in any of this, And I don't think that we've fully, look, we've been handed something awesome here. It's like being handed fire at the beginning.

And fire is pretty great, right? You can cook some stuff and it can warm you up. Fire can also burn you and it can also burn the house down. And I think we have to start looking at tech like that. It is a tool and you don't want it to burn the whole house down while you're warming up the place. And don't burn the book as well. And don't burn that book, which burns at 451. That's right.

I want to move to, maybe a, you know, touchy subject for you and feel free. You don't have to answer. We can always edit out. So you've written a book. You come highly endorsed from your friend Jordan Peterson, who's become, you know, incredibly controversial but incredibly successful. You talk about the power of having mentors. And you talk about the image that he's cultivated and how it matched the reality that you

observed as the opening act on a year-long tour with Jordan during his 12, 12 Rules for Life, World Tour, everywhere around the world, Australia and back in the U.S. in many shows, even brought him up on stage to do a comedy set. It's quite touching to see that. He's your mentor. He's your friend. It seems like he's a little bit of a father figure to you, as he is to, you know, presumably many people around the world. I've never met him. I haven't had the chance to read the book yet, but I know how influential he was. Given that he talked so much about self-care, and given that you have obviously become enlightened to this notion of taking care of yourself, your husband, hopefully soon, your child to come, that that being aware of self-care,

do you feel like he let you down in any way? I mean, he's had struggles with addiction, and he's been very candid about that and his children as well. I wonder, how did that affect you when you found out about that, if you care to talk about it. Yeah, I'm happy to talk about it. The one word answer to the question is, do I feel like you let me down is no, without question? But I will expand on that, obviously. First of, you know, when we were on tour for that year plus,

and it was 120 stops in something like 23 countries, something like that, Jordan was very open that he was taking a very small amount of benz-o, of, I think, Clonopin, for anti-anxiety. He would talk about it on stage, actually. So this wasn't, first off, you know, I think a lot of people think he was like secretly doing drugs and secretly a pill popper or something like that and then publicly presenting something else. So first off, I want to be 100% clear that is simply not true. That's number one. Number two, we were in the middle of the country. I think we were in Iowa. We were having lunch and, you know, he does this carnivore diet. So the guy has a ribby for breakfast, usually a ribby for lunch and two ribbys or a tomahawk for dinner. Steak. That's it. He's the only Canadian. The only Canadian who does that, right? A rugged Canadian.

He belongs to Texas. In Texas. But we were at lunch at a steakhouse, I think in Iowa, when he got the call from the doctor and his wife that his wife had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. I was at lunch with him, and I heard the phone call. Eventually, I walked away from the table. I saw this man not only, I mean, try to imagine the incredible highs of fame, the rigor of traveling like crazy, the media.

media hit pieces and the good stuff, the audiences cheering and the protesters. I mean, the entire up and down craziness, then he finds out his wife has terminal cancer. He's traveling sometimes with her, sometimes without her. I mean, the extraordinary, truly extraordinary pressures. And by the way, you have to keep in mind that this isn't a guy, this isn't like a comedian or an actor. Right. It's usually going on the road.

Right, in vaudeville. But that was chasing fame. Yeah. You know what I mean? like a comedian or an actor, they're usually chasing fame, and then one day, if they're lucky, they become famous. This is a guy who is a clinical psychologist who is writing books that are pretty dense idea books, right? So he didn't chase this thing, and suddenly he had this thing. Anyway, adding all of that up, and then the fact that his wife was diagnosed with his terminal

cancer, he did, I didn't know it at the time, but he did end up upping the amount of benz-o. I don't want to even go into that any further. Suffice to say that people can have an adverse reaction. You can actually have the type of reaction where you up it and you get the reverse where it's supposed to be anti-anxiety and then it becomes more anxiety. What I will tell you is this. I did see him a couple months ago.

He's doing better. It's a struggle. It's a real struggle. And more than anything else, and I think this will directly answer your question. He's a human. He's a human. The guy wrote an incredible book.

I've got it right there, 12 Rules for Life and Maps a Meaning even before that. He wrote a life. giving people what he views as a human, the best tools to live their best life. It does not mean that he's Jesus or that he is somehow this perfect machine that is impervious to the human condition. That being said, I have no doubt that as he's going through what he's gone through, that he's using his own rules to fix himself.

So I think that's part of it. And by the way, that's why we shouldn't, even though I think you should try to find a mentor, we do need people to map a future version of ourself after. Michael Shermer, by the way, who you spoke to last week and who introduced us, I love Michael. From the first time I had him on the show, I thought, this is someone who thinks clearly we have a couple of disagreements. It doesn't even matter what they are.

But I know him to be a good man and an interesting person, all those things. So we need people in the world that we can map that sort of thing after. But you should be always wary of thinking that they're, perfect because there are no perfect people. And, you know, the simplest way of saying this would be, can you can you separate the art from the artist? You know, I mean, that's really it. Like, you can, you can make a piece of art that's absolutely brilliant and could express a deep, deep truth. It doesn't mean the perfect person that painted it is perfect. And it's often, the opposite. And it's quite often the opposite. Yeah. In the book, and this,

I don't necessarily want to get it to, but you obliquely kind of comment about, you know, fatherhood and in your life now that you're and your husband are playing. And you're, planning this, but you're also kind of obliquely reference your own father. Again, I don't want to get into that. But I think part of being mature is that recognition that you just mentioned about your parents, about your mentors, about your heroes, that they are human beings. And this book is kind of the hero's journey of how you went on this role and this journey. And part of the hero's journey, you may know, from Star Wars or whatever, is that, yeah, your parents, you have to leave your Yoda and you have to become on your own. And I wonder, looking at

at Jordan, looking at this experience from someone who, from all appearances, seems so earnest and interested in helping people, and yet has such vitriol, as you said, coming back at him, and he's yet very poised and dignified, as you talk about in the book, from his dress to his, you know, to his mannerisms, the way he treats the waiter and the cat. There's a story, there's a passage in George Orwell's animal farm from Benjamin the donkey. And he says, the donkey is being envied, I think, by the pig or something. And the pig says, you're so lucky, you got this awesome tail, and the donkey says, yeah, the Lord gave me a tail, the swat away the flies, but I'd rather not have the flies and not need the tail. And I wonder, looking at Jordan,

looking at these people that you, you know, like, do you worry about getting too big or cultivating, you know, such a persona and through your projects, your company, and through the Ruben report, do you worry that there is a flip side of this? Maybe you won't be able to take the Sabbath, this detox, and do the self-care that. you need or especially as you bring a child into the world, you know, it's an awesome responsibility and it's an incredibly maturing thing, hopefully experience for parents. Do you worry about the implications? You're sort of, you know, attaching them. You won't be able to do as much. You'll have to be, you know, if in order for you to say yes to things like going on a world tour or whatever,

you'll have to say no to this precious little, infinite, you know, spark of love. And how, are you prepared to cope with it? Or is that something, you know, you're happy with this? I think, I think about it all the time, all the time. You know, just related to the, let's say, the fame part of this, look, I'm not going to sit here and say I have no ego, and I'm not going to say here, and it's not nice when, you know, when I get a lot of retweets or that, you know, already we know the book has sold really well before it's even out

or all of those things. I'm not going to pretend those things aren't nice. I like when people come up to me on the street and at the supermarket and whatever. Not every moment of it, you know, first off, You know, this is an interesting thing for, you know, we live in a time where there's so much hate online, but I can truly tell you that I think with with one half of an exception, anyone who's ever come up to me in real life at a supermarket or at a movie theater or at a pizza joint, whatever it is, these are great people who just want to say hi and say, oh, you know, you had a little something to do with my life or I dig what you're doing or whatever it is. I love all of that. But I can tell you that as someone that is, I suppose, on that on that up side of the bigger thing. I am worried about that at some level. I don't really have a desire to be more famous than I am right now. I don't have that hole in me that needs to be filled. If anything, I would prefer the reverse, actually. I really like the work that I'm doing,

and I view the public part of it. Look, I'm on camera. When I interview people, I'm on camera. You put a book out there. You're going to be seen and read and heard and all of those things. but in a way it's almost like a it's a nice bonus but you don't want it to be it's like a dopamine yeah the dopamine that's the thing it's a treat but you don't want to indulge on the treat all the time and and i hope that i'll be able to navigate it properly you know fortunately because of some of the people who we've mentioned here i've seen some guys go through this beast before and i've seen some of the mistakes and i've seen some of the successes and i'll i'll try to and navigate it the best I can. But yes, will it affect all of the things of my future life

about how much I can be around for a child or, I mean, things that you don't want to talk about, safety concerns and all sorts of other stuff. These are all things that I do bounce around and think about. But I guess what I would say is more than anything else, whatever the concerns are, whatever the trepidations are, the worries are, none of them would supersede my desire to do what I think I'm supposed to do. I wouldn't let a fear beat me out of doing what I think I'm supposed to be doing, and that is just this. And I think that's really the point of life. You know what I mean? You have nothing to fear but fear itself, right? What does that really mean? It means you're supposed to go. You're supposed to move forward in life. And fear is what can stop you. It doesn't

mean that having some level of fear, fear, by the way, can push you, right? But what you don't want is fear to be here and you're pushing through and the second you get to fear to Calaway because you don't know what's over there. And, you know, I'll continue to do the best I can. But I think that's all that anyone with their head on straight is doing. Yeah, I think you're right. And just to touch on that, I learned from the great rabbinical sage, Carrie Underwood, that, which is actually true. I actually look this up. The most often repeated phrase that God tells either Moses or the Israelites in the Old Testament in the Torah is, do not fear. and it's interesting, you know, do not fear the stranger, do not fear the alien, you know, and serve,

et cetera. And I think that is true. Fear is an impediment. And just to your point, I read somewhere Bill Murray once was asked, you know, I want to be famous, you know, and he's like, and do you have any tips to be famous? And he was like, try being rich first, because being rich, you know, I hope to find that out someday. But, but I help you do too. Well, very quickly, for people that maybe don't want to read the entire Bible to get that point across, you could just watch what I think is Albert Brooks' best movie defending your life. And the whole purpose of the book, sorry, of the movie, is that he ends up in purgatory, he's dead, and the only way he can move forward is that he has to prove, and the movie is about a trial of his life. He has to prove that he's conquered fear. It's an

absolutely wonderful movie. I think it's his best movie. And that concept that you have to defeat fear. it's a very human thing. Yeah. I wonder, I have about eight to ten questions or so. Do you have time to go for another ten minutes? I got whatever my guy has said. All right. Okay, good. So I'll speed it up a little bit. I want to talk about tactics now. So we discuss your digital detox tactics, which I think could be a book in itself. What about public speaking? How did you prepare your, you've done stand-up comedy? Do you think that there's sort of this meta-skill stack that, you know, goes into, you know, tips, you know, things to be a comedian involve convincing, emotion, connection, are those tactics that you can then bring into writing or the converse? Is that sure?

What tactics? Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I think everybody has a different skill set. Everybody has a different toolkit. For me, you know, I could just get up there. I was never nervous on stage, really. I'm not saying I never had any nerves, but like the nervousness or when you hear, you'll hear comedians or publics, talk about the nerves and they couldn't get on the stage, they couldn't get out of their bed, they were freaking out. I never had any of that. I would kind of walk on stage and in a weird way, I felt very empowered and I even do now, when I was on tour with Jordan and, you know, the PA announcer

would say, now the host of the Rubin report, Dave Rubin, and 3,000 people applaud as you walk out there with a microphone? What an incredible feeling that is. I mean, that, that, I remember the first night that it happened because I mentioned this in the book, that it was a surprise that I was, it was a test show, really that Jordan was running out here and I said to him right before, you want me to come on and make a couple of jokes and he said yeah and i went up and they announced my name the crowd didn't know i was going to be there i had no idea if these people even knew me right jordan's way more famous and and important than i am and once that first time happened and i felt that it filled me up and and you can run with that so i would say it's really it's different for

everybody if you really have stage fright well you got to work through that i think the best thing you can do and i always try to do this in stand up and i try to do this and everything I'm doing, including an interview or when I'm being interviewed or when I'm interviewing someone else is I try to be as present as possible. And if I'm really doing it well, I'm not even trying because you just are. Yeah. And I don't, you know, when I give talks now, one of the things that I was most impressed by with Jordan is he would give a different hour and a half lecture every night. It's incredible. He would give a rule, sometimes he would talk about all 12 rules. Sometimes times he would talk about one rule. Sometimes he would talk about no rules. You talk about what his day was like.

And one of the things that I think I was able to incorporate in the last year and a half post working with him on this is that when I give talks right now, usually I don't think about it during the day. If I have to give an hour talk, let's say, at a college, I don't think about it at all during the day. For a few minutes before the talk, I kind of just take a breath and I'm like, what is on my mind right now? And for me, if I get that starting point right, just the basic starting point of where

I want to go, then the end point, it gets there. I usually, I never have an ending set in mind when I give a talk. I have the starting point and I'll figure out how to get there. You build a parachute on the way down. Yeah, which maybe in some ways, but you know what? Maybe that's not the safest thing to do, but for me, I think it's the most expressive to get the best self of me out. That being said, there are some people that are perfectly good public speakers who I hear that give the same speech over and over. I just can't do it.

I just can't do it. And that's what I mean about the toolkit and people being wired differently. I remember hearing, you know, this word. words of praise from a comedian about the comedian Louis C.K. And, you know, he's had his problems, but this isn't relevant to that. But he said something like, guy writes new material every year. And I was like, you know what would happen if I wrote new material every year? You know, it's called unemployment. Yeah, yeah. Every year, that's pretty impressive. But there's a great moment. There's a great moment in the Seinfeld, when the show ended, he did a documentary called comedian.

Comedianian. It's about him getting back into stand-up. And there's a moment where he's in the car with Gary Shanling and they were really best friends and brothers in comedy. And they're talking about their process. And Jerry, you know, he's got his notes and, you know, they're just every word, every inflection, every, it's all just there. And he says, Gary, what about you? And Gary pulls out this crumbled piece of paper. And he's like, I don't know, I scribbled this down. And it's like, they're both brilliant comics, but they have, they have different brains. Right. I think one tip, I'll just say it in the interest of time that I take to heart and I agree with wholeheartedly that you brought up that you learn from Jordan, your mentor, Jordan is to dress up, you know, the feeling that you had

putting on, you know, look, you don't have to dress. So you could re-learning, you know, shorts and the, you know, flip-flops for all I know. And you talk about that's your basic, you know, plumage when you were off, off stage and even sometimes on stage. But you learn from him that, you know, part of it is looking the part and looking at being professional, even if your job is the professional gesture. So I thought that was one of the hacks, the talking points that they'll make people, it just breeds an air of confidence when a man or woman gets on stage to give a talk. I want to finish up with what I call the final five, just a rapid fire series of questions that are kind of standard across from my listeners.

So the first thing is that I've always felt that, you know, as close as we have to kind of DNA, at least as, you know, creative homo sapiens is our books, you know, and books have this ability to be transmitted our ideas, if not our DNA, our memes, if not our genes into the future. So one question I'd be curious about, would you rather have 100 readers of this book or a thousand readers of this book a year from now or one reader of this book, 100 years from now or a thousand years from now, should we make it that long? I love the meme and gene conversation, right? Because I think it's just so cool. Some people can spread their genes.

Some people can spread their memes. I love looking at the world through that. Hopefully I'm going to do both if everything works. if everything works out right. Good luck. I would say right now, because of what I would say is a truly unique time right now, I would want as many people as possible to take this book in right now. I think the thing that I'm most proud of is I wrote this thing way before Corona,

but so many of the issues that I'm talking about in this book. I mean, look, just I'll just give you one because I know you want to do this quick. I mean, the state's rights issue that I so focus on here, which is what our founders wanted. a month ago nobody was talking about states rights everyone's talking about states rights now because there's an actual crisis so i want people to read this now so that they can think about how we're going to move forward clearly because we better think about it otherwise we're in a lot of trouble and speaking of you know readers uh not not in the in the deep future but in the present if you had a

choice you had to choose one group who would you rather read this book cover to cover uh you know the haters or the fans? I think the fans deserve the book. The fans deserve a little cover for some of their ideas and they deserve it. I'm always down to to talk to the haters if they'll do it respectfully, although they don't often, but I've given enough to the haters. Yeah. So last couple of questions. What are you most pessimistic about? You said you're kind of a guarded optimist, you know, you're three quarters of a glass full, perhaps. What are you most pessimistic about? Well, I'm just worried that with all of the success that we've had as a society, that the Western world has had, that maybe the sad, depressing truth is that we've grown too fat on our success. We've grown too fat on our wondrous prosperity and that the guardians will be at the gate.

And to loosely quote Douglas Murray, we'll be debating what gender pronoun to call them. that we will have so lost the goal that our eye will be looking elsewhere as all the bad ideas come in. And I think maybe that actually gets to your earlier question about why are all these books suddenly out there? Why are these voices suddenly out there? The zeitgeist. Yeah. Because maybe this is the last stand. Maybe. That would be pessimistic, yes. So if you were an optimist, if you were a pessimist, I'd ask you what you're optimistic about. But instead, the penultimate question is a favorite quote of mine from the great thinker, writer Soran Kierkegaard, who said that life can only be understood

backwards, but you must live it forwards. And I'm curious for you, what aspect of life in your 20s was mysterious, fraught with fear, perilous, seemed mysterious, that now you look back through the telescope of time, and you have clarity that you'd like to communicate to that former version of yourself. You know, I think if I could have said anything to myself, in my 20s, if I could meet myself in my 20s and CGI can do it now, so I'm sure some of the meme makers will be on it ASAP. I think it's interesting because I don't have any regrets, truly. It's not to say I haven't made mistakes along the way, but I think overall the mistakes were just part of the tapestry that led to something good, that led to something with purpose

and all that. So I don't have regrets in a traditional sense, but I perhaps wish that I had been a little bit easier on myself. I think I would have told myself to take a breath that this whole thing has happened before and it's going to happen again and be more accepting of my flaws and my faults and to really bring it back to the beginning of the book. You know, I did a lot of stuff that I'm not proud of when I was in the closet and it's hard to live one life much less two or three. And I think I would have, I would have done things differently if I could have. And I would have maybe sat myself down and said, hey, listen, you can either be yourself or you can see what's going to happen. And I think most people, and it has nothing to do with sexuality. It's like, be yourself.

Yeah. That's the message. Yeah, that was one of my favorite quotes from the book is where you say just this to be authentic. And it's not just because I'm a practicing cosmologist. Then you'll know why. It says, as if that isn't enough staying closet, it also changes your relationship with reality. That's because every time you're inauthentic with the universe, you're disrupting your experience of it. I think that nicely couples to what you just said. So I found the very same thing. In my field, it was my ambition to win the Nobel Prize and really seeking that and became an idol for me. And once I realized that it wasn't so, it really was this naked emperor, so to speak, I felt deeply liberated and almost that kind of, you know, unclosited feeling if I could even

relate to it. So the last question I have is, what you've been? become, you know, is obviously pundit, a thinker, now an author. What you do in your skill set is that, how much of that was innate and how much of that creativity, imagination, curiosity do you think can be taught? Some guests say it can be taught, some say it's innate. Where do you come down on that spectrum? You know, it's interesting. I can answer this question more clearly having written the book because, you know, one of the things that I talk about in the book is growing up in a family where we debated and argued everything and every holiday. And I'm sure you have your own version of this as well. But I mean, this is the thing. You know, you have four Jews at a

table. You have five opinions. So every holiday we had, whether it was Passover or it was Thanksgiving, it was like everybody was kind of arguing over everything, fighting over everything. There was yelling, whatever. And then dessert would be served and everybody would just kind of forget it. And it was like the next day. My dog's going crazy right now in case you heard that. But we would just sort of reset the next day. So I think some version of my tolerance for ideas, my ability to debate, my ability not to hate people because they think different things, comes from that. And then I would say the other part is that because of what I've done for the last five years interviewing thinkers that have thought about all of the stuff that we have

talked about here very, very deeply. And I haven't judged whether I've had, you know, Bishop Barron from the Archdiocese, a Catholic priest in here, or Rabbi Wolpe from the, you know, Temple, that's the Sinai Temple. Sinai Temple, thank you. Or a skeptic like Sam Harris or whatever it is, that I've sat with these people and treated them as individuals who are on the experience of life. I've actually taken pieces from all of them.

So people will say, well, Rubin, how can you be friends with Shapiro? He's a homophob. And it's like, he has a worldview that he's not imposing on me. I can learn something from him. And I have. And by the way, I think he's learned something from me too. And I think, so it's both. I think I've, I had an upbringing that allowed for some of this to happen.

And then as an adult, I applied those things to people that had great swaths of knowledge that I've been able to incorporate into a life that is, you know, pretty decent. Well, Dave, thank you so much. This has been a really stimulating, fascinating discussion. I like to take a couple seconds just in what I call the plug zone. to mention people can find you at the Rubin Report. And also your book has its own website. Don't Burn This Book, the title of the book.

And you can also get it from penguin randomhouse.com as well. Anything else you want to promote? You mentioned the locals. Yeah, no, listen, I really enjoyed this. As I said, I think you sort of take like the high-level stuff and you go a couple layers deep, which is really nice. And that's actually the whole purpose of everything that I do. So it's, you know, being on a book tour,

while I'm sitting in, this is my garage, where I thought I was going to be meeting all these people in real life and bouncing around and all that. I think there's a particular nicety to finding some of the interviews that are a little different and a little quirkier, and I thoroughly enjoyed this. So I reach it out. Well, thanks very much. Let me know when you do your next big project. Maybe you're going to do a Netflix special or something so I can short the market. Well, I know for sure what I'm going to do next is walk my dog because he's giving me the signal of it. Okay, great. All right, Dave. Have a wonderful day. Good luck. the book and keep in touch.

of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego in the Division of Physical Sciences. Directed by Eric Beery, Brian Keating, and Patrick Coleman, produced by Stuart Volgo. For more information, go to imagine.ucsd.org.org.org. Find us on Twitter at ImagineUCSD.