Dave Rubin: preference

Transcript context

…Now another innovation you’ve been behind is the notion of crowdfunding your own activities. And you’ve been very successful with this. Could you tell the audience a little bit about how that’s worked for you? Yeah, so crowdfunding actually has been the greatest freedom that I could possibly imagine. So we started my show, don’t boo immediately, but at first I was with the Young Turks, which is a progressive, or regressive in my view, online news network, and we were with them for about a year and a half. And then I moved over to Ora TV, which is Larry King’s digital network and that’s really where the show took off and I was talking to people like Sam Harris and Ayaan and all sorts of people. And that’s where the show really hit its mark. And after about nine months, I realized we had sort of grown to the point, and I was getting so much email from all over the world and people saying that they were feeling something about these conversations that we were having, that I thought we could do this independently. So there’s a site that some of you may be familiar with called Patreon. And basically my audience, you can give a dollar a month, which you get a newsletter. You can give $25 a month, you get a T-shirt. You can give $100 a month, I do a small group chat with a couple of people, so a little video group chat. If you give $500 a month, I do a one-on-one with you for 15 minutes. And all sorts of different tiers. And they fund us to about $30,000 a month. It’s about 4,000 people that do it. And it’s beautiful, because the truth is I don’t know… My audience is hugely diverse in terms of politics and they could really never sway me anyway, because I don’t know really what they think. I communicate with some of them, but it’s truly a way to be intellectually free. Now, consider comedy and politics. Some people have the common view that the major comedians out there, they’re left wing. There’s Colbert, there’s John Stewart, it might seem superficially that if you have a sort of anti-establishment attitude, it’s easier to be comic about that. Lenny Bruce in the 1960s, Richard Pryor, it’s easy to be against something and to be funny. Do you think there’s some kind of bias in the medium of comedy against a mix of libertarian, conservative, social conservative ideas?…

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