Whole thing and there was a night at about six years ago or so where its a very memorable night across the world millions of times actually where Ben Affleck was on real time with Bill Marr and he was alongside sam harris, of course the neuroscientist who mostly talks about mindful Medication And Sam was releasing a new book called waking up, he guided to spirituality without religion. Bill and sam were talking wellknown atheists and started talking about religion and then the topic of radical islam came up. Sam made the point we all know which is that you ought to be able to separate ideas and criticize any idea whether its the republican Party Platform or the doctrine of christianity or in this case they were talking about islam, but you wanted to be bigoted towards republican people or towards christians or muslims Et Cetera so separate ideas to people. Thats the way sam laid it out and Ben Affleck became incredibly irritated and red in the face pounding the desk screaming at him is essentially calling them gross and racist. It was interesting to me because i had been seeing this on the progressive side but seeing and a List Actor broadly speaking was no longer into debating ideas. Over the course of the next few months or years after that suddenly there was a slew of articles about how Bill Marr who is the standard for the liberal movement in america the last 20 or 30 years, suddenly he was a racist because batman in essence said it and that was one of three moments i go into in the book that caused my awakening. So even though ben is probably not thrilled to be right at the top of the book, i did put him in there. I almost asked at the start of a bad joke which is what do David Webb and charlie and Ben Affleck have in common . What were the other two . The David Webb moment, and im sure most of the viewers know he is a conservative Radio Host has been on the Patriot Channel for many years. Hes a Fox News Contributor and Ghost Host for sean hannity. I had a show on a Sirius Xm when i was just starting out in the business. David webb was on the right and one day we bumped into each other and struck up a friendship. I started going on his show probably once a week or so and i would debate on the left and he on the right. Then we would go downstairs and have some Steak And Whiskey and we were good to go even though we disagreed politically we liked each other personally. Flash forward a couple of years, at the young turks they were showing a clip of him on Fox News and the David Webb happens to be black. He is a conservative but i dont think his Skin Color defines him. I was sitting with several of my cohosts, and they were talking about how he was an Uncle Tom and Sellout And Couldnt really believe these things. Somehow because as a black man he had to be a progressive, he couldnt possibly be a conservative. What they didnt realize was i knew David Webb. I was and am friends with the David Webb and they are saying the worst things about him. I know him to be forthright Et Cetera. That moment crystallizes for me because here i thought you are the ones calling everyone else racist and yet when a black man says something you dont like you think that gives license to call them all of the worst possible things, sellout, Uncle Tom Et Cetera. So that because it was personal and it wasnt just a guy in a Tv Box that they were saying something about, but my friends, so it made it very obvious how backwards everything had become. Host charlie . He broke the straw on the camels back for me. Everybody knows what happened with several jihadists burst into the offices, which is really the greatest and longest running Satire Magazine but france has an incredible history and they had made fun of jews and christians and muslims and all the political leaders in france. It had been an equal opportunity offender. They were not happy that they were in this case making fun of islam and have a cover of mohammed and killed several of the cartoonists and writers that you may remember over the next couple days. What was interesting it was a profoundly horrific event and absolute assault on free Speech And Freedom of expression but broadly speaking the last was suddenly defending the jihadists like dont poke the bear, dont make cartoons of things they dont want you to make cartoons of. The staunch opposition to any totalitarian ideology in this case free expression you should say whatever you want. That doesnt mean there are no repercussions. We cant in any Way Excuse Violence but in this idea many people called soft bigotry that if you talk about those people, those ideas that suddenly those People Cant take it, thats quite bigoted. I think you can see a theme around all of them and i believe that liberalism was about Discussion And Freedom of speech. And unfortunately i think everyone sees this in 2021 that has little to do with what the modern progressive movement is. You describe yourself as a classic liberal today. What do you mean by that . A classical liberal is what i think most people think they need when they say liberal but unfortunately the word has been propped up. You believe in individual rights and the rule of law and in some ways you dont want the government to do everything that we should all be treated equally under the law. It was about equity, not equality. They decided we should change the results of society based on Skin Color and based on Sexuality Or Gender and all these things and that is quite antiliberal on top of the fact these constant cries of calling everyone resistant bigots and homophobes to stifle to the discussion is the most antiliberal thing you can possibly do. So i want equality for everyone under the law if you live in america and you are here illegally, equality period, no exception, and i want the government to have some guardrails on society so to a lot of people that sounds very similar obviously to the libertarianism and i dont mind if someone calls me a libertarian that i want a little amount of guardrail so the society doesnt go completely off. The right wing is authoritarian and puritanical but you say its just the opposite. It is just the opposite and believe me that was a shock and i suspect some of your audience is going through it themselves and realizing it as a shock to them as well. I make song arguments that are certainly not thought of as mainstream conservative arguments. I make a pro Choice Marriage Argument that we are supposed to be told somehow the right or the conservatives hate people. Its not true. I spoke at Liberty University about two years ago before lockdown, the largest evangelical college in the United States around 14,000 kids that they do this weekly Vocation Event and i talked about being married myself. Ive been with my husband for ten years and i talk about being prochoice and i got a standing ovation and people came up and said we agree with you on this so much, on a couple little things but thats okay. What i found i make a prochoice argument in the book as well that isnt really thought of as something on the right but there are conservatives such as rudy giuliani. Ive seen a plurality of thoughts and willingness to agree to disagree on the right while in essence the modern left is doing, the new progressives are doing they are saying these are the ten things we believe and if you dont believe them, the second we believe them you now are a Bigot Or Racist or homophobic and the conservatives who of course are not perfect are basically sitting back and saying lets have our defectors, our oldschool liberals over, lets have our more traditional religion conservatives. I think that is beautiful and probably about 80 of america. The question is can that hold and how do we make sure it holds. Thats what im interested in doing. Id rather build bridges and go to the place. What happened to you when you came out as conservative or liberal . The hate was just unbelievable. The endless Mobbing Online and having phone numbers leaked and addresses and the endless, its too much to go into i dont like thinking about it. The stuff going online. And i talked about in the book an autoimmune disorder that is completely stress related and i lost probably 40 of my hair. All my hair right now is a lot of hairspray in there but i actually met several other people that have gone through something like this before. When we talk about cancel culture and the mob, what people fear is the jobs will be attacked, the family members will turn on them and they are going to post something, some fairly counter, nothing radical but nothing have you seen this story. This is something you are not going to see on the cnn or msnbc. Im going to post this on my Facebook Page and then people are blocking you and calling you a nazi. So many people go through this. When you get to the other side, they dont kill people yet. We are not at that level of sectarian violence. When you get to the other side you will realize not only do you stand up for yourself because it is the most important thing you can do as a human being but there is fertile ground on the other side to talk with people and maybe it isnt exactly what you thought it was going to be, but it is a pretty decent group of people. So living in fear of the woke machine is not a good place . Im sorry, could you repeat that . Living in fear of the woke Machine Isnt a good idea of life . No, it is a horrible way of life. What separates us is that we have the ability to think for Logic And Reason to solve problems to build and innovate. That is what makes us human and if you as a human being dont do what you are supposed to do because of some amorphous small but and that is what it is by the way. If you were to say who is the mob, its hard to point at exactly who it is. If you are just fearful and say what you think, you are destroying yourself. This is the frog in the slowly boiling pot. The Temperature Isnt going to be turned down. Your acquiescence is what is turning the temperature off and it doesnt and that well for us. You have a chapter in your book, dont burn this book called no, you are not a nazi. If you bought my book i assure you are not a nazi. For most that are called nazi in the modern times this is to get back to where we started on the conversation, this need to label everything just because they have different opinions the way we do this. Not only is it a denigration of the past but its an abuse of language and by the way these tactics are done by the same that say everything is cultural appropriation that is a type of cultural appropriation if you are unjustly calling a bunch of people nazis and bigots and everything else but the reason i wrote that Chapter Org titled it that way is because it was obviously somewhat tongueincheek but i wanted people to realize they called me a nazi. You know what you are still here. They called you that a bad thing and you are still here. If you keep doing whats right and using Logic And Reason hopefully and being a decent human being and try to connect with other decent human beings, you will suddenly realize that there are cries that are nothing but false words and they only have power if you give them power. I want to bring another person that played a role in your coming out as conservative and that was larry elder. Im here at freedom fest right now. I actually had him on my show in Los Angeles this week of course hes running for governor of Los Angeles and i think that he has a shot. Larry is a famous moment that has been seen millions and millions of times and put into oblivion on youtube and elsewhere. I was sitting down with the conservative Radio Host from Los Angeles. Been in this fight for 30 some odd years at this point and we started talking about the systemic racism. You say a phrase and use a systemic racism, he came at me with affirmative action and all of the bad policies brought by the democrats that harmed the families and he really beat me senseless. It was a pivotal moment for me. When we finished the interview i went into the Control Room and everybody said im an interview and halfway decent at what i do thats the moment that was real and i dont look great. I came to a Knife Fight and didnt bring a knife. But i said we have to air it as is and what was interesting is once it went up it was conservative Radio Host destroys. At first i wasnt happy about it but then i started looking at the comments. I started continuing conversations with people that i thought were my ideological opponents like Ben Shapiro were several other conservatives and what i found was again even though i had some disagreements on Marriage Or Abortion or education since these lockdowns on education i dont mind if someone calls me a future conservative or modern conservative but in many ways what i try to conserve his liberalism. What is the Rubin Report and how did it come about . The Rubin Report started as just a straight up old school much like this a Larry King Interview show. Videos were six seconds and everything was smaller and smaller to go viral and i didnt like it. It was factoring our ability and i grew up loving Larry King who became a Friend And Mentor and as i described a Bonus Grandfather to me in some ways and i thought i would love to sit down with people for an hour or so and not have an agenda. I will take down a couple of notes but if i never look at my notes and that is the best interview with her is because that means youve got something to say and i will just weave my way through the conversation in a way that you would if you were at a dinner with a friend so i tried to create a space that was open for anyone of any political stripe to talk with me. Sometimes i agree with people and sometimes i dont. I now do a daily show that i talked to the camera for about a half hour i dont consider myself a journalist but unfortunately i think most journalists are journalists with air quotes and activists. So i try to give a fair analysis of the news, but i make no qualms about the fact that i have a particular lens through which i view the world and i try to do it with as much of a smile on my face as i can and a little bit of humor to make it fun for people and not just be the talking head thats making everybody crazy. Its the best compliment that i can ever get and ive heard it quite a few times since ive been here. People will come up and say you are keeping me sane throughout this craziness. Thats all im trying to do, not to enrage people or make anyone vote a certain way. Im not trying to keep everybody outraged but to lower the temperature little bit and if i lay out a couple of principles as i did in this book, then its up to you do you believe these things, maybe you dont but thats okay. To paraphrase you, how could you think this way and be gay at the same time . One of the saddest things is gay people used to be about free Thought And Music and Culture And Art that came out of the community because it was a sort of Counterculture Community because of your sexuality which was the other, it created this wonderful sort of ground for good things to pop up which is why so much came from the gay community. Although i wasnt embedded in the community per se, one of the things i say now is its become so monolithic. Theyve become so politically incorrect. They were the most politically incorrect. You see moments where places it was either out magazine or the advocate im forgetting which one where they wrote a piece about how the paypal cofounder how hes not gay because hes a republican conservative. Wait a minute, now someone whose beliefs are different you actually will take away their sexuality that brings it back to what they were trying and differ believed these kind of things. It is unfortunate to see but i see a lot of gay people waking up to this by the way. Where and how did you grow up . Im a true New Yorker. I grew up in new brooklyn in 1976 and spent my first couple of years there and grew up in long island. My parents finally made it out of brooklyn the american dream you grow up in the city and make it out to the suburbs. Then i went to the university of New York and lived in manhattan most of my life and then in 2013 moved out to Los Angeles, so its funny the only two places ive lived our New York and for my formative years new York City and now Los Angeles yet the things i talk about, a lot of issues weve talked about are the things that resonate in the middle of the country so by living on both sides, somehow the message became the middle of the country. Is there such a thing as cancel culture . There absolutely is such a thing as cancel culture. You dont even need to ask me you can go onto facebook and see the amount of people that are constantly attacked or anything to do. Thats not to say you cant disagree. This is the most liberal thing you can do, put your idea out there and let it be countered and let the best ideas when. Let the sunlight be the best disinfectant. But weve decided if we dont like something and in the most pro Verse Way if we can cancel from the past to somehow remedy the present weve gotten rid of and jemima and nobody really knows why. We got rid of Uncle Ben and nobody really knows why so we are taking black people of products you see in stores so should we only see white people and products in stores and that would be that tolerant society we are building . That sounds like a white Supremacist Society if you willy saw white people on the product yet that is being brought to us by the supposedly tolerant progressives so we cancel things like that. One that i love to bring up is hulu canceled an episode of golden girls where they were doing face masks, so they had brown face masks and the episode is actually about to be arthur who plays dorothy, her son marrying a black woman and the whole episode is these two people who come from different places in different Skin Colors coming together, its what america is supposed to be all about, but hulu removed that episode out of the 200 or some episodes because of supposedly black face by betty white. First of all that wasnt a black face and second its betty white, the most beloved woman in america and no one honestly believed that if you removed that episode come if you can no longer see that episode of the golden girls where two families came together over race that weve become a more tolerant society. All of these are making us a left society. You refer to social media as an alternate reality. It is an alternate reality especially twitter. We are inundated with other peoples thoughts all day long. There was a beauty i think to the internet it was created in social media and in 20 years weve realized that this was going to make us more social creatures but and many ways its been antisocial and fearful and angry at people and suddenly you realize that perhaps somebody went to high school or used to like suddenly you hate their politics and hate them and people are fighting all day long and of course all these things are free except we are the product in essence, our digital souls are the product on these things and what that leads to is a very politically polarized situation which is what we are in right now so i try not to tweet on the weekend. You may know i talked about in the book i do august off the grid so starting next week on august 1st, i will be disappearing for one month no phone, no computer, no television, no news absolutely nothing then i come back September 1st and this year i had Comedian Adam Corolla who will catch me up on what i missed and it will be my fifth year doing it. I did it almost as a joke but what ive realized over the years of doing it, it gives me Peace And Sanity and a little bit of space to reset. We are all in this matrix constantly and i dont think we have to be. I think it is making most of us pretty miserable. So there are ways to escape it. If you can do a month, how about a weekend, saturday. A saturday. Most people could try that. Isnt there a Withdrawal Factor that plays into that . Im sorry could you repeat that . Is under a Withdrawal Factor that plays into that going off the grid in a sense . There absolutely is a Withdrawal Factor. The first few days my hands go into my pocket like wheres my phone. You get these random buzzes and you wonder what did i miss or what is the big News Thing happened and i didnt get to comment or tweet about it or whatever video i was going to watch, its not there whatever it might be. In all the years ive done it and i know other people have joined me and give me the same feedback theres a couple days it could be a little tenuous or anxious youre going maybe i shouldnt do this or im going to miss something but once you get over that usually i would say four or five days in you start realizing how we dont need these things. Lets not forget this is how we lived for thousands of years thats how human society was operating. Im 45yearsold and i do remember a time before internet and the iphone and in retrospect it was pretty good, wasnt it . Before we close, theres an endorsement on the front of your book, engaging personable and above all reassuring by doctor jordan peterson. Who is that . The preeminent public thinker of our time, a clinical psychologist in Toronto And Professor at the university and also taught at harvard and several other schools. Jordan became several years ago started getting into the political incorrect fight, started talking about in canada they were going to penalize people if you miss gender to somebody which was framed at if jordan was somehow against trans people, hes not against them at all he just didnt want the government to be able to compel. Most logical people understand the difference there that you should treat people with respect but the Government Shouldnt punish you for using the wrong pronouns or whatever it may be. That really blew him into the stratosphere and in the online world hed written a book called the 12 rules for life which was the number one Selling Book of all 2019 so something like 8 million copies worldwide i had the true honor of being on tour he did about 120 stops and shows in a year across the world. He was spectacular and what i saw this man do was say this is what i believe, these are the rules that have helped me live a decent life and i think that they can help you live a decent life and every night we would go to a soldout theater after sold soldout theater and i would see people incorporating those ideas into their lives and they were sitting up straight with their shoulders back and taking the world on instead of carrying away from it. It was a truly extraordinary year that i had with him and an honor to be there. Hes had health issues since then but i know he will be back soon and the world needs him. The host of the Rubin Report and the author of this book dont burn this book thinking for yourself in the age of unreason. Booktv. Org. From the heres a look at the late civil Rights Leader john lewis