Dave Rubin

‘I want you to walk into a bar and order yourselves a full-bodied opinion,’ Dave Rubin writes in his new book. It seems the podcast host’s habit is more along the lines of glancing over to the next stool and saying ‘I’ll have what she’s having.’ Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in the Age of Unreason is currently sitting in 12th place on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Reviews, though, have not been particularly kind. 'Despite its provocative title, it's hard to imagine anyone being so angered by a book loaded with the same milquetoast arguments that he's been hammering for years,' wrote Anthony L. Fisher in Business Insider. 'Don’t Burn This Book is not a serious work.

It’s a normal hot day in Los Angeles somewhere east of the 405 freeway. It’s also the day after Labor Day, so talk show host Dave Rubin, like most Americans, is back at work. For him, though, it was more than a long weekend. He’d been off the grid for 33 days straight, the whole of August and then some. No news, no phone, no nothing. So the first thing he says to me when I walk in the door is ‘Don’t tell me anything about current events! That’s part of the deal on the show today. The guest host is going to tell me what I’ve missed.

A common view is that the mainstream media loves censorship. Mainstream commentators smear people as bigots, mainstream social media platforms close their accounts and mainstream politicians applaud their efforts. Alternative tendencies like the 'Intellectual Dark Web' have emerged to oppose censorship. But is the alternative media free of its own censorious trends?One of the more memorable episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience involved the comedian cum commentator-cum-podcaster Mr Rogan sitting down with his friends, the comedian Bryan Callen and the UFC heavyweight Brendan Schaub. Schaub had just come off a loss by technical knockout and expected to discuss the bout in a collegial fashion.