Going From Woke To Awake - Dave Rubin - #164

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, hello, people of Podcast Land. Welcome back. My guest today is none other than Dave Rubin, host of The Rubin Report and author of Don't Burn This Book. Today, we're talking about everything that he's written down, including how he left the left, what it feels like to deep throw a red pill on your own show, what Dave sees as the problem with modern liberal thinking, how Batman calling someone racist can be a life-changing event, why Douglas Murray could be a viable candidate for a superhero and much more. But for now, please welcome Dave Rubin. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Dave Rubin, host of The Rubin Report and author of Don't Burn This Book. Dave, welcome to the show.

**Dave Rubin** (1:06)
Chris, it's good to be with you. We are doing this across the pond over these digital waves that everybody is now stuck on. We thought we were too online before this thing, then Corona comes and this is the only way we can do anything.

**Chris Williamson** (1:19)
I wanna be more online now, yeah. First things first, Dave, why is your book dedicated to Ben Affleck?

**Dave Rubin** (1:28)
This is either gonna go down as a brilliant marketing ploy or Affleck and the Affleck Empire will have me destroyed. We should know the answer in the next couple of days. But I devoted the book to Ben Affleck because I tell the story in the book about how Affleck actually, believe it or not, was a key piece to my political awakening because you may remember Ben Affleck was on Real Time with Bill Maher when Sam Harris, the neuroscientist and really mindful thinker, was on to talk about his book, Waking Up, A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, and they started talking about how you have to separate ideas from people, meaning we should be able to criticize ideas, and that doesn't mean that you should be bigoted towards people, and they were talking about it in a religious context, so in this case, you should be able to criticize the set of ideas that is Islam, but what you wouldn't want to do is be bigoted towards Muslim people, and by the way, of course, you should be able to criticize any set of ideas, whether it's the set of ideas that make up a religion, Judaism, Christianity, whatever it is, or the set of rules that make up a political party, or a set of rules that make up basketball rules, anything like that. Sam calmly laid this out, and Bill Maher sort of backed him on this, and next thing you know, Affleck was huffing and puffing and screaming, and in effect, he called Bill Maher and Sam Harris this gross and racist. And this is about five years now, five years ago. And in that very moment, I saw exactly what I had been thinking was wrong with the left, exactly what I had been thinking was wrong with the progressives, in stark daylight. I had had these thoughts for a while, you know, you're just calling everybody racist, you're calling everybody a bigot, you're always morally right, and with this indignation and anger, but suddenly to see it turned on this mild-mannered neuroscientist, who I didn't even know who he was at the time, and then Bill Maher, who really was the standard bearer of the left, at least in an American context, he's been basically our biggest, most outspoken lefty, the guy gave Obama a million bucks for his re-election, I mean, he has fought every progressive issue, you know what I mean? And constantly railing against Republicans, and then Affleck says you're gross and racist, and then the next level of it was watching the media just parrot that, because Affleck said something, just because a Hollywood star said something, next thing you know, Vox and Buzzfeed and HuffPo and all the usual suspects are suddenly saying that Bill Maher and this Sam Harris guy, that they're racists, and that was really one of the, I lay out three key points of waking up going from say, woke to awake in my book, and that was one of them. So I feel that I owe Ben Affleck, even though we've never met.

**Chris Williamson** (4:11)
Thanks, Ben. Yeah, it's interesting that sometimes, even though we know things, we need quite a symbolic inflection point to happen so that it causes something, right? So my favorite quote of the whole book is right in that section, and I'm just gonna read the passage out now. So you're talking about the particular way in which Ben puts his words across, which is compelling to a very particular type of watcher, viewer, listener fan. This tactic is typical of people who don't know what they're talking about. Instead of having a solid argument based on fact, they simply moralize their way through life, shooting people down and throwing terms around as a distraction. Their over-the-top emotion is enough to convince unthinking people on a base level. They've won because it appears as if they're morally right. Man, I really, really love that. I thought that's a lot of sense-making going on there.