DAVE RUBIN | Going From Woke To Awake | Modern Wisdom Podcast 164

This is just factory setting thinking. This is just stuff that you get from the media, you get from culture. It's like, Democrat good, Republican bad, Democrats care about poor people, Republicans care about money. There's a million of these nonsensical things, and all that is is factory settings, that through culture, through state education, through all these things, that is where we all sort of baseline start. It's your job to modify your system to something that you like, and that's w- that's what the way you behave with the world should be as well. (wind blows)

I'm joined by Dave Rubin, host of The Rubin Report and author of Don't Burn This Book. Dave, welcome to the show.

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.

It's all right.

We thought, we thought we were too online before this thing, then corona comes and this is the only way we can do anything.

Actually, I wanna be more online now, yeah. First, first things first, Dave, why is your book dedicated to Ben Affleck?

(laughs)

(laughs)

Uh, this is either gonna go down as a, 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. Uh, 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, 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, the neuroscientist and, uh, really mindful, uh, thinker, uh, was on to talk about his book, Waking Up: A, 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, uh, 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, you know, uh, uh, uh, basketball's rules, anything like that. Uh, 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 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, in stark daylight. I had had these thoughts for a while, you know, where you're just calling everybody racist, you're calling everybody a bigot, you're always morally right and that with this indignation and anger, but suddenly to see it turned on this mild-mannered neuroscientist who I, 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 our 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 rallying 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 'cause 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, and this Sam Harris guy, that they're racist, and, and that was really one of the, 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.