Robert Evans and Shireen Lanayuta dismantle Dave Rubin's career, exposing his pivot from The Young Turks to hosting the "intellectual dark web" like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro. They critique his books, Don't Burn This Book and Think Freely or Die, for promoting white nationalism, poor sales ranking near 5,000 on Barnes & Noble, and historical inaccuracies regarding Hitler. The hosts highlight Rubin's inconsistent drug policies and ironic associations with figures who purged gay members, concluding that his refusal to debate critics and reliance on Koch funding have ultimately limited his relevance as the intellectual dark web fades. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Introduction to the Podcast00:02:52
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they failed.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
If you're watching the latest season of the Real House Wise of Atlanta, you already know that's a lot to break down.
Marcia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a married man.
They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew.
Pinky has financial issues.
On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real House Wise franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the T everybody's talking about.
To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Is that an introduction?
I like is that how a podcast starts?
Okay, well, that's the introduction to the podcast.
I liked the intro you did before we started recording better.
Oh, when I said, what's Sophieing my Lifterman's?
Yeah, because I'm obsessed with myself.
I know, but I can never do the same introduction twice.
The Rise of Comedians00:15:41
That's fair.
So we'll just pretend it didn't happen.
Leave it.
That's part of my contract with the government.
So this is Behind the Bastards podcast about the bad people in the world.
And we're doing something a little bit different today.
See, it's helpful in this show with all the breaking news that happens in the world and the fact that I sometimes go cover it live to have a little bit of a backlog built up.
It gives us some flexibility, lets us do things.
And we lost that backlog this summer because of all the riots that I had to attend.
So we're trying to build that backlog back up.
But I got to write like 20 pages a week just to keep moving.
So we're working on some ways to get ahead a bit.
And one of them is today's special episode.
We're focusing on what I would call a little bee bastard, someone who would not be enough to get an episode of Behind the Bastards on his own, but I do think is interesting in the way he's shitty.
So I've written a short essay about him and then we're going to delve into his book.
And to help me explore this particular little bee bastard, this special piece of crap, is Shireen Lanayuta!
I'm back, fam.
I'm back.
Come on, Shireen.
We're talking about David Rubin.
Oh.
Thank you.
That was, wow.
The last little bee I thought you would say.
David Rubin.
Should I know Rubin?
David Rubin.
I think, I mean, that's good.
Should I know who David Rubin is?
No, you shouldn't.
You really shouldn't.
He's very popular among people who are trash.
Yeah.
Oh, great.
He's not very popular.
He's like moderately popular because he hangs on to people who are very popular among people who are trash, but he himself is of at best modest notoriety.
Now, he's been very successful at writing the coattails of some of the shittiest people in our discourse to modest success.
Actually, significant, like a lot of money.
But that's part of the business.
He's a trash leech.
A trash leech.
Robert just stepped away, so it's my opportunity to say off the top.
I want to get this out of the way, but I don't know if I could top my last appearance.
That was a trip for me.
But I really, really want to thank everyone that reached out to me via email, Twitter, Instagram.
I read everything you wrote.
I tried to respond to everyone that I could, but it really meant a lot to me.
And yeah, it was just really sweet and really affirmed that I should be vulnerable and normalizing.
Talking about sex and sexuality is so important to me.
And it's okay if I'm the vehicle for that sometimes.
But yeah, I just wanted to say a really quick thank you to all the listeners that are listening now that maybe have reached out to me because your words really meant a lot.
Thank you.
That's all.
Well, that's very sweet to hear.
And very, and very soulful, which is appropriate because the person we're talking about today doesn't have a soul.
Not a single ounce of soul.
Yeah.
Good to know.
Good to know.
Yeah.
Which makes you the perfect guest for this episode because you are full of soul and love and warmth.
Oh, thanks.
I really feel dead inside most of the time.
So that's nice that you have that impression of me.
So, Shireen, you don't know David Rubin.
He's like a YouTuber.
He's a right-wing YouTuber.
He gets a lot of coke money.
And he's pretty trash.
So we're going to read a little essay about Mr. Rubin, and then we're going to read from his book.
Oh, which is called...
Oh, you're going to love it, Shireen.
It's called Don't Burn This Book, which is, I think, a pretty sad attempt to make people like to act as if there's anything actually disruptive in there, as opposed to just being another cash grab by a guy whose basic modus operandi is to support the Republican Party.
So David Joshua Rubin was born on June 26th, 1976.
Obviously, since this isn't a standard episode, I'm not writing 10 pages on this guy, but we do have to get some context of his career because it's interesting and he's emblematic of a species of grifter.
He grew up in what he called a fairly secular household in Long Island.
He came of age in Siosset, New York, or Syasset.
I don't know how you fucking East Coast.
Fucking, I hate that whole fucking coast, Shireen.
It's S-Y-O-S-S-E-T, New York.
He grew up there.
He got a bachelor's degree in political silence at Binghamton University.
And despite a complete lack of talent and charisma, Dave decided that he was going to be a stand-up comedian.
So Dave decided that he was going to be a stand-up comedian.
And he had no talent in comedy, no ability to really work a crowd.
But he decided to give it a shot anyway.
So he started rampaging through a bunch of open mics in New York.
Most of his jokes centered around the fact that he was a gay man.
And isn't that funny?
Like that kind of comedy.
I've never heard that before.
Yeah.
In the early aughts, he was one of the hosts of a podcast called Hot Gay Comics, which I'm sure was...
Very, I love when people make their sexuality their entire personality.
Yeah, I'm gay and I do comedy.
That's the joke.
Yeah.
He made a public access fake news program, like a parody of a news show, in around 2000.
And he co-founded a couple of comedy clubs.
His career in standoff never really took off.
Like he was, he was, he had a certain level of prominence like within a certain community, but it was not the kind of thing he was ever going to make a good living at, which is why he quit in 2007.
And I think looking at a few clips of him being a comedian, it's very clear why his career didn't take off because he's very, very bad.
He's a void of charisma.
And I'm going to send you a link here.
I was just going to say, I love that you put yourself through that, but now you're putting me through that.
Oh, yeah, no, absolutely.
Thankfully, this is from a tweet by Nathan Robinson.
I'm not sure if he's the person who collected the videos or not, but somebody took clips from a bunch of his different stand-ups over, I think it was probably over a couple of years.
And so we just have him, like a few different punchlines of his so we can see how the crowd reacts to Dave Rubin.
Lesbians love Amstel.
What is that?
What is it?
It tastes like water.
Is there anything hotter than a lesbian spitting Amstel light all over herself?
This has become very uncomfortable.
And you, I think you're gay.
But you're...
Am I right?
No?
Really?
No.
Mormon?
You raised your hand.
Does anyone need their genitals warmed up?
That is our show.
All right.
Did you guys have fun?
Does anyone need their genitals warmed up?
Yeah.
That's a joke.
That's insufferable.
He's not straight.
So that's the joke.
I did post.
This is pretty funny, but I did post this image the other day that has this wound on someone's arm and it says white guilt.
And then there's a band-aid coming over it that says queerness.
And I do think some people use their sexuality and or queerness.
And this is coming from a queer person.
White people use their queerness sometimes as a way to skirt around the fact that they're problematic and that gives them this like leeway to say whatever they want when really it doesn't do that at all, if that makes sense.
I'm like summarizing that meme in a very roundabout way, but weaponizing your sexuality is never really to disparage someone else is never really advised, in my opinion.
Yeah, and I don't think he was meaning to be disparaging at this point.
I think it was just a matter of like, he's not a very good comedian.
And so like, you know, this was the early aughts, early 2000s.
That was sort of like, like, you, you watch a lot of TV shows that had like gay characters in them.
And like the joke was that they were gay, but it wasn't like they weren't trying to be mean.
It was like attempting, like, there's a Simpsons episode that won an award for gay representation that is cringy to watch these days.
But like at the time, they were like, oh my god, the gay people in the show aren't monsters.
Like it's like, so I think he was kind of writing that wave, which didn't last long because people were like, oh, what do we just treated everybody like people and like didn't didn't, you know, and and Dave.
He was reaching for material and didn't really, he couldn't reach very far.
No, and he, yeah, you can see there, like, he can't work a crowd.
He has no charisma.
People don't like him when he does like a live show.
And this made, you know, a career in live performances less than an ideal professional route for Dave.
But he did have some talents.
You know, he was good at organizing things.
He put together some comedy clubs.
You know, he was, I assume his show was funny enough that it earned him some, like the local access show that it earned him some attention.
And he got an internship with the daily show's Jon Stewart.
What?
Yeah, which is big.
And this is like early on, like when Jon Stewart is like kind of having his big rise to prominence, you know?
So Ruben does that for a little while.
And I think it eventually leads him to get hired by the Young Turks Network and it moves to California and stuff.
And the Young Turks is like a, yeah, so like, we'll talk about them in a second.
But yeah, so he gets his own show, the Reuben Report, on the Young Turks Network back in 2013.
Jon Stewart and the Young Turks, that's pretty left, you know?
Yeah, and he's left at this point.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, yeah.
He's he's he's at least masquerading as a progressive at this point.
So he's like 37 years old when he gets his show with the Young Turks, and that's kind of his big break.
Now, the Young Turks are a progressive left-wing news network, unadvisedly named after the architects of the Armenian genocide for reasons too complicated to explain here.
The network's number one claim to fame was providing the launchpad for the career of one of my favorite journalists, Ken Klippenstein, who's pretty fucking cool.
We love him.
Yeah, he's the best.
The best Twitter follow you could ever hope for.
Yeah, he fucking rules.
So for a while, like that's kind of like, it's a pretty, you know, progressive network, not hard left, but not Democrat, like kind of soft left, like Sandersy is kind of where we'd say it.
And for a while, David's show was pretty standard, like soft left-wing fare.
I'm going to quote from Rational Wiki here, kind of summarizing the stuff that he got up to on his and the Rubin report in its Young Turks days.
He publicly criticized National Rifle Association commercials, trying to incite the fear of consequences of gun reform laws being planned to be passed by the United States Congress, addressed a decision by McDonald's to remove healthier foods from its menu in a critical manner.
On a 2014 episode of The Young Turks, he rebuked self-regulation in the economy and claimed that it has never worked.
And he was supportive of single-payer health insurance.
Okay.
Yeah, he's fine, like, right?
He's like a pretty normal, like, kind of lefty Democrat.
Nothing too outrageous.
There were, however, some early signs that something might be a little odd with Dave.
In 2014, when Israel invaded Gaza, they had their war in Gaza in 2014.
The Young Turks did like a 40-minute sort of like episode roundtable where they all kind of talked about what was happening.
And Dave got into fights with absolutely everybody by kind of like, not kind of, by repeatedly defending Israel's behavior in the war.
And in subsequent shows, he repeatedly denied like war crimes that had been committed by Israel.
He showed up on like a radical atheist kind of podcast to express a bunch of like pretty much outright lies about Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause.
So like there were some signs like, okay, Dave's, something's going on with Ruben here.
Something a little bit not the standard for the milieu he occupies.
As I'm wearing my Palestine shirt.
Yep.
Yeah, Palestine isn't free.
Yeah.
And neither is my time, Dave.
Sorry, I'm not wearing.
I shouldn't have told you.
I didn't see the lower part.
Palestine isn't free and neither is my time.
Oh, that's funny.
Thank you.
So Dave, yeah, it's a little bit odd.
And he keeps getting into arguments with other folks at the Young Turks, particularly the founder of the network, Shank Uyghur.
And this is probably more or less like why he winds up leaving the Young Turks network.
He and Jank had an escalating series of disagreements that started with Rubin's comments about Palestine.
Rubin himself would later claim that he grew apart from the left because of its obsession with identity politics, hostility towards free speech, and unwillingness to debate openly.
He now has a completely different story for why he left the left.
But, you know, as we'll cover, that's the main reason that he's prominent now is that he used to be on the left and he gives a bunch of lectures on why he left.
So that's kind of the whole thing.
He's just monetized that very effectively.
So the Young Turks allowed Rubin to take his show and its YouTube account with him.
He bounced around from company to company, including Aura TV, which was founded by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and Larry King.
That didn't work out, and Rubin went through a number of different hosts and networks over the course of about a year from 2014 until 2016, which suggests he might have been kind of a pain in the ass to work with.
In 2016, the Rubin report went independent, and Dave Rubin finally found the thing he was good at.
See, 2016 is like the easiest possible year you could have picked to get into the business of making right-wing propaganda on YouTube.
The mix of prevailing political wins and Google's algorithm meant that even an idiot could make money spreading quasi-fascist propaganda for a while.
And Dave, unfortunately, was not a total idiot.
In a move that showed just how savvy he could be, he pivoted his show to almost exclusively hosting guests who were members of what would come to be called the intellectual dark web.
You remember that?
That thing?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So he, yeah, he sees that all these guys, these like kind of regressive right-wing thinkers, are rapidly gaining in popularity thanks to a mix of Google's algorithm and like just sort of the political, you know.
So he starts having all these dudes on his show as they're rising, which number one builds a relationship with them so they keep showing up even as they get big, and it kind of allows him to siphon off from their fan bases and build a large fan base of his own.
And this is a very effective tactic.
He starts interfacing more directly with other chunks of the right-wing information sphere, including Prager University, where he stars in a viral video called Why I Left the Left.
And I'm going to send you this clip.
You're going to start it at three minutes and 29 seconds, and you're going to run it to four minutes and three seconds.
If that okay, lucky me.
I know.
You're going to really be happy today.
I will say, the minute you look him up on Google, his face-I know I say this maybe every time, but a very punchable face, a very extremely punchable face.
Grifting on YouTube00:04:14
If you look a punchable face, that's what comes up.
For these reasons, I can no longer call myself a progressive.
I don't really call myself a Democrat either.
I'm a classical liberal, a free thinker.
And as much as I don't like to admit it, defending my liberal values has suddenly become a conservative position.
So if you think people should be able to say what they think without being punished for it, that people should be judged by their behavior, not their skin color, and that people should be able to live the way that they want to live without government interference, then there's not much left on the left for you.
Yeah, yeah, you get the idea.
Yeah, that's the way he and the video is very successful.
I don't know how many views does that fucker have right now, Shireen.
Oh my God, it has over 14 million views and 212,000 likes.
So that is way too many.
All this, together with like having people like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and the kind of IDW intellectual dark web crowd on his show over the course of 2016 builds a huge brand for David Rubin.
And again, the appeal is not Rubin himself, although I think he probably thinks that it is.
The appeal is that he has all these people who are really popular on and controversial, and he's willing to have conversations with all of these people.
And he consistently refuses to identify as right-wing, as he said in the video.
He calls himself a classical liberal.
He endorses a libertarian, not Trump, in 2016.
But in spite of this, he repeatedly agrees with far-right talking points, even endorsing banning Muslims from entering the United States.
He has people like Mike Cernovich and Milo Yiannopoulos on his show, and Lauren Southern, who like went on his show and defended Richard Spencer while he goes, mm-hmm, uh-huh.
Yeah.
It's Milo so much.
So his episodes with these out-and-out fascists, like Milo, were ostensibly the civil debates that he claimed that he loved, but he never actually pushed back against any of these right-wing folks, like not never.
So they're not really debates.
They're just him platforming and agreeing with terrible people because he's terrible.
Even when like Ben Shapiro, his quote-unquote friend, expressed the opinion that Rubin's very marriage is itself immoral because Ben Shapiro doesn't think gay people should get married.
Rubens like doesn't it none of this provides any conflict for Dave Rubin because as will become increasingly clear, he's never believed in a single thing in his entire life other than Dave Rubin being famous and rich.
I mean, that's a huge, that's a great point.
It's never about the platform or the politics or anything, and it's all about ego.
It is never about anything but ego.
And he's just doing everything he can possibly do to inflate his ego.
And it's just, it's not about standing up for anyone but himself.
And I mean, not even that.
He doesn't even stand up for his own marriage.
I wonder what his fucking husband thought about that.
Yeah, he talks about how disagreements with Jank are why he left the Young Turks, but also like the Young Turks were never going to make him rich.
Like, I think they pay a living wage, and I'm sure he got a living wage, but you don't get rich working for those folks.
I mean, maybe Jank has, but like, you're not going to get rich doing that gig.
You can get rich, especially in 2016, being a far-right YouTube grifter.
And I mean, the other thing about the Young Turks is that he would never be the main character.
You know, he wants to be front and center, spotlight.
He is not because it's about his ego.
It's not about anything else.
And the sad thing is, he's still not the main character because he only has gained success by like attaching himself lamprey-like to more successful grifters.
I'm going to quote from Business Insider here.
Ruben's interviewing style is to rely on civility, which in practice serves as a platform for the guests to present their arguments unchallenged.
But the idea seems to apply for only one side.
In a 2019 interview with then-Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, Rubin scolded her for making what he called a slippery slope argument in comparing the Holocaust to slavery.
Guests like far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, who said Jews control the banks and media, Stéphane Molyneux, who said blacks have smaller brains than whites, and Lauren Southern, who defended Richard Spencer's white nationalism as distinct from white supremacism, whom Rubin later called fearless, were met with no pushback at all when making egregious statements on the Rubin report.
Luck vs. Skill in Business00:04:12
Oh my God.
Wow, wow, wow.
Wait, can you...
That was too much.
My brain can't handle all of that.
Yeah, it's a lot, right?
Because he's a piece of shit.
He's just garbage.
Do you want to think about what you want to say while we take a quick action?
You know who's not garbage?
You know who won't platform Lauren Southern?
Ooh, ooh, who?
Who?
Who?
Who products and services who support this podcast?
Wow.
No way.
Nice segue.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Prison and Political Deals00:03:20
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Got a little bit of good news before we dive back into Dave Rubin.
Please.
Harvey Weinstein's lawyer just said that if not released, he'll die in prison.
Which is like, okay.
Don't threaten me with a good time, bro.
Oh, man.
Like, I don't, I actually hate the idea of incarceration effectively used as a death penalty, but also, I'm not going to, I'm not going to, I'm not going to, I'm not going to use any of my fucks that I have to give on fucking Harvey Weinstein right now.
Yeah, exactly.
You know what?
I'll promise, for the sake of intellectual consistency, if we deal with 30 or 40,000 more pressing problems, I will care about that injustice.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, down the line, maybe.
Yeah, sure.
We take care of a few 10,000 problems, deal with climate change, stop the rise of fascism, reform the criminal justice system so that black men stop getting murdered by cops and indigenous people stop getting murdered by cops.
In the war on drugs, release everybody with a drug-related conviction.
You know, we get all that done.
Then maybe I'll be like, yeah, we should make sure Harvey dies in a two-bedroom apartment that is comfortable.
It also keeps him isolated from the rest of humanity rather than locking him in a torturous cell.
I'll get on board that.
I don't know.
I think I would still, we might disagree on this.
I think he maybe should die.
I think I would, I think you, I don't know.
I'm not willing to endorse him dying in prison, but I will have a long argument with you about whether or not he should die in prison while he's dying in prison.
And then if he happens to die in prison while we're trying to come to an accord.
Uh-oh.
Oh, that's a good point.
Okay, wait.
Okay, I see what you, okay, I see, I see my initial, my anger got the better of me.
But yeah, you're right.
I think you're completely right.
I think justice needs to be served in a better way than just him disintegrating in a prison cell.
Yeah, I think he and Paul Manafort.
I think he and Paul Manafort should have to inhabit a small apartment in Wiskegun and cook citrus all day.
Oh my God, Weistine and Manafort roommates.
I would watch that reality show.
And they can be the only ones picking citrus on whatever farm they're on because neither of them can be allowed to talk to people other than each other.
Yeah.
Two old monsters grifting each other and picking lemons all day.
Narrowing Ideological Spectrum00:15:08
Getting heat struck.
It's kind of entertaining to think about.
It is fun.
Okay, so we're back to Dave Rubin.
DeRube.
Drube.
Drubin.
Drube.
So yeah, I'm going to quote here from his write-up in Rational Wiki about sort of how all of his positions changed as soon as it became very profitable to be a right-wing grifter.
Of course.
Rubin reversed his earlier stance on self-regulation in the economy, saying on a 2018 episode of the Joe Rogan show that he wanted major deregulation and greater self-regulation after saying it never works.
In addition, he showed an ever-expanding devotion to bringing in controversial right-wing figures, including those with sympathies to causes of objectivist-style libertarianism and people with far-right views on topics on his show in the name of free speech.
One such figure is Stefan Molyneux, known for both objectivist stances as well as reactionary attitudes to women's rights, given his openly negative view of women, as well as Molyneux's support of racialist perspectives.
He's a Nazi.
When he does invite guests on the left now, it's usually only to complain about regressivism, which is his favorite word, that the left is regressive, which he Fights against by partnering with people on their regressive right, I guess.
So, Ruben's pivot has made him into a wealthy man.
His YouTube channel has well over 2 million subscribers.
Again, he works for one of the foundations or whatnot that he gets funding from is funded itself by the Koch brothers.
It's a traditionally shady thing.
Yeah, he gets Koch money.
As of 2019, he's hosted by Glenn Beck's The Blaze Network.
And all of this has made him a very wealthy man.
He bought a $5 million house in the Hollywood Hills like a year or so ago, very recently.
Yeah.
All of this has caused Anna Kasparian, his former colleague and friend at the Young Turks, to call him a lazy fraud who wanted, quote, to make a six-figure salary to host a 30-minute a week show despite herself and her colleagues working 12-hour days for far less.
She reiterated that he sold out to corporate America by pointing out he's received money from the Koch brothers and alleges that he has no true political identity.
He's not an honest actor nor an intellectual, just a fraud, plain and simple.
I like her.
Yeah, that's pretty accurate.
And she was his friend, which has to be a bummer when you're for that.
I mean, it's like weird to work with someone on a very left-wing platform and then suddenly see them swap over to the other side simply because it's more lucrative and, I don't know, attention grabby, because then it just proves they were never about any type of cause.
Like, she's right.
Like, he doesn't have any political opinions.
He's just, he's just an attention whore.
And that reminds me to throw in a plug for my new nightly show on Fox News, Robert Evans Left Bad, which I will be recording from the private island that I bought with my signing bonus.
Robert Evans Left Bad.
Yeah, that's left bad.
That's what that's what I was the best you could come up with.
Yeah, exactly.
Left wing bad over and over again and playing clips of Antifa looking scary.
I've made $70 million already.
Nope.
Robert Ebby.
You don't think about it at all.
Bad.
Left bad.
I hate it so much.
If you're going to be a right-wing grifter, you can't think at all about what you're doing.
Robert.
I mean, I speak for the listeners.
We expect better.
Robert Evans.
You're not my listeners anymore.
A bunch of frightened elderly people watching Fox News are going to be my listeners now.
And all I have to tell them is that the left wing is bad.
Why would it not be behind the left bastards?
That's too complicated a title.
Way too complicated a title.
Robert Evans left bad.
I'm just going to think about it.
How about left equals bad?
That's the one.
It's getting worse.
So let's move on to it.
It's getting worse.
It is getting worse.
So there are, thankfully, some signs that Dave's ride to the top may be nearing an end.
Much of his fame and his fan base were developed due to his close relationship to members of the intellectual dark web.
He was often seen as the group's hype man.
And in fact, he acted as the hype man for Jordan Peterson during the professor's world tour after the release of his book, 12 Rules for Life.
Like he would introduce him at shows and stuff.
This gets worse and worse.
Terrible, terrible sets.
But in recent months, the intellectual dark web has kind of faded into a subcultural memory.
We don't talk so much about those guys these days.
They become less.
Why is that?
Like, how have they made that possible?
Like, how have they made themselves truly fade away into the background while still existing?
The intellectual dark web's whole goal was to kind of provide.
Do you know what parachuting is?
Remind me.
Well, there's a couple of ways to do it, but one of them is you put like a bunch of drugs that you're going to take and like a little packet of something and swallow it so that it dissolves slowly in your stomach.
And it's kind of a way to avoid the nasty flavor and to get maybe a longer high.
It's parachuting.
Wait, can you repeat that?
I'm going to take some notes.
Okay.
Yeah.
So Like the intellectual dark web, we're kind of parachuting fascism into our culture by like wrapping it up in like just asking questions and the other kind of shit.
But they did it, but they did it.
They did it.
And now they're not as relevant anymore.
But that's what they wanted.
In a way, is that what they wanted?
Like, it's.
I think they just wanted to be famous and prominent intellectuals.
But the problem is that now it's moved beyond them and the right is represented by a mix of the president and a bunch of gun-toting, howling, violent fascists.
And people like Ben Shapiro don't have nearly as much cultural cachet as they used to have because things have moved far beyond them.
And things have moved far beyond guys.
Like, obviously, Rubin's biggest break was his friendship and his relationship to Jordan Peterson.
And Jordan Peterson's brain melted this year.
And his daughter first subjected him to experimental Russian drug addiction therapy and then gave him COVID.
So he's not really someone that Dave can cash in on anymore.
Yeah, who knew that an all-meat diet would do something to your body?
I think that was a good idea.
I don't even know if that's what did it.
It's just in general.
Yeah.
Dave Rubin also had kind of failed during his maximum period of expansion to really have any actual, like a bunch of left-wing folks kept asking him to debate, like, and he would never say yes.
And he would actually regularly block them when they argued with him because he actually hates debate.
So he doesn't, he's kind of locked himself into this position where the acceptable ideological spectrum of discussion in his show gets narrower and narrower every day.
And he can't really bring in new blood.
And the thing that he, what was once a fertile field for a guy like him, which is kind of like, I hate the left now.
I'm not a right-winger.
I'm a classical liberal.
Like, listen to me.
As things have gotten more polarized, nobody gives a shit about that anymore.
Or at least people give less shits about it than they used to.
And I actually found a write-up in Medium from one of his former fans, who is still really a big fan of guys like Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris and Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, but who has gotten bored with Dave Rubin lately.
And I want to end this chunk of the episode with a quote from that.
I say this as someone who genuinely admires people like Sam Harris and even what conservatives like Ben Shapiro have to say.
In 2019, the Rubin Report is only concerned with the same handful of repetitive topics.
Criticism of social justice warriors, political correctness, and student coddling on university campuses is all well and good, but it has reached the point of ad nauseum with Dave Rubin.
I would further argue that outside of niche internet political circles, the vast majority of people in daily life are hardly concerned with these subjects to begin with.
After the eighth or ninth softball question interview with a right-leaning guest on dunking on blue-haired ginger studies majors working at Starbucks and other blase conservative talking points, I eventually decided that listening to the Rubin Report every week was hardly the best use of my time.
And this dude, who's a fan of his, got blocked by Dave for like arguing very politely with him on Twitter.
Because again, Dave's little fragile, fragile little baby.
Yeah.
Well, fragile, fragile man ego.
Wow.
So that's a little overview of Day Rube, of Drew Man.
Day Rube.
Day Rub.
But is it time to make fun of him now?
It is.
It's time to look into his terrible book, Don't Burn This Book.
It's like reverse psychology.
Like, because now all I want to do is burn his book.
Oh, see, I don't care about his book that much.
But I also just like to burn things.
Maybe I should preface that.
I like to.
Yeah, I mean, I do enjoy a good fire.
Yeah.
And the book is like the cover is Don't Burn This Book in big letters, subheading, Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason.
And there's a big match on the book.
And we're going to do the thing we always do where we buy the book and then refund it as soon as we finish here.
I'm surprised his face isn't on the cover.
Yeah, so am I.
It has like a jacket quote from Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, which I guess must be one of the last things Dr. Jordan B. Peterson did before his brain melted down.
Yeah, whatever.
Yeah, so there's a fun quote in here from, yeah, his publisher writes that in a time of madness, the book will give you the tools you need to think for yourself.
Which is very funny for Dave Rubin to say.
You don't really need to think for yourself.
He's never thought a single thing.
No, he just lets other people spew their thought vomit out on his show, and then he nods unless he's a mouthpiece for literal garbage.
He disagrees shallowly.
Yeah.
And a representative passage from the book before we get into it reads, I want you to walk into a bar and order a full-bodied opinion.
I want you to get absolutely wasted on facts until 3 a.m.
And then when you're just about ready to pass out, I want you to get another glass of reality and chug it.
See how funny that is?
The comedy?
Wow.
He's like reading his drinking.
He's got metaphors.
And you get drunk on knowledge.
Wow.
Wow.
Yeah.
And it's not even like the funny version of that.
Like you could do a funny version of that where it's like, I want people to be well-informed.
I want people to get wasted on the facts.
I want you to be shitting on the floor of your aunt's apartment with knowledge.
Yeah, exactly.
But Dave, I'm sure when he read that back, he was like, fuck yeah, man.
Yeah, I'm comedy.
Yeah.
I'm a genius.
Yeah.
It's, I don't know.
Like, he's bad.
Anyway, let's look into his book, shall we?
I actually want to start by reading.
So I told you, he's given a couple different versions of the story of like why he finally left the left.
And, you know, it started with his, like, what seems to be the facts is that he had a bunch of disagreements with Jank about his support of Israel over Palestine.
And like that led to other disagreements.
And he was just kind of a pain in the ass to work with.
But in his book, Rubin gives a very different story.
And he claims that like his break with the left started in 2016, which we know it happened much earlier, but this makes it is kind of a better story.
And it was during an interview with Larry Elder, who is a conservative talk radio, a black conservative talk radio guy and a very experienced talk radio guy.
And Rubin used the phrase systemic racism and Elder challenged him and rallied off.
You know, he did the thing that like you can do if to people who aren't good at debating about something like this and like give off anecdotes about individual incidents of police brutality that were misreported or talk about black on black crime, which ignores the fact that white people commit the most crimes against white people and ignores the fact that like, no, there's actually quite a bit of like, well, yes, there are misreported cases of police brutality.
There's a lot of documentation about like because Rubin doesn't do research because he's dumb or at least because he's a bad researcher or at least because he's dishonest.
He had nothing like, he had nothing to say against this.
Yeah.
And so he claims that like this interview with Elder is what changed his opinion, which is like why it's a smart move for him to try to pull, I guess.
He did it a little bit late, but like he has to kind of rewrite that history because 2016 is such an inflection point politically.
And because this way he can he can claim that like, no, it was like a conservative black man who like pulled me a gay man away from the left.
Well, okay, but that's just I wanted to clarify something that I said up top about white guilt and queerness because this is perfectly proves my point is that when some people that are already marginalized, like if you're a white gay man, like you could argue that you're already marginalized.
And so you don't have to examine how your whiteness is still problematic.
And so I'm sure there's an element of that as far as kind of using a black man to like prove his point, like prove, like, like help his story along because like in his mind, like I'm also, I'm also marginalized.
Like, I'm not, I'm not like other white people.
Like, I understand.
So I don't know if that makes sense.
Is that kind of.
Yeah, it does.
And he definitely does this thing where, like, he, one of the things he rails against the most in his show is identity politics.
But he also focuses on, like, well, I'm a gay man and I think that's crazy.
Yeah, exactly.
He uses it to only prove backwards points when really he's not using it as a crutch to not examine how his whiteness is the main, like a huge point of his privilege.
Yes.
Yeah.
And especially because he is able to pass as like presumably, like he's not someone that would get ostracized in society by looking at him kind of thing.
And so I think there's also privilege in passing.
And I think he really uses his sexuality as the worst kind of weapon against actual marginalized people, which is so upsetting.
And it's so upsetting for the gay community in general, because I don't know.
That kind of brand of whiteness is really upsetting to me.
Yeah, it's very frustrating.
All of it's very frustrating.
And the way in which he kind of cashes in on, look, a black man agrees with me about the left.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Is very gross.
And his book is very silly.
So I'm going to read from kind of the end of the introduction here, where he lists first off the greatest contemporary thinkers in the world, which includes Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Thomas Soule, Dennis Prager, Brett Weinstein, Ayan Hirsi Ali, Christina Hoff Summers, who did a documentary about the men's rights movement.
And of course, Peter Thiel.
Wow.
Famed greatest intellectual in the world, Peter Thiel.
Wow.
They all, I mean, I guess we know where some of that money's coming from, huh?
Parody of Intellectuals00:11:22
It's like he's writing a parody.
Yeah, he is like a parody.
Everyone who tries to be an intellectual on the far right is like a parody of a smart guy.
Really?
Yeah.
They too came out of the political closet and helped me to see that tribalism is dead and that diversity of thought is far more important than diversity for its own sake.
We need diversity of thought.
We don't care.
It doesn't matter like if we, if everybody's white, as long as they think different things, we can have a like.
God damn it.
Wow.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
That's like one step away from like, I don't see color, but there's like a different way.
There's like a different.
That's what he's saying.
Yeah.
He brands his book as a 10-step guide for political authenticity and promises in it, you'll learn how to embrace your wake-up call.
It's the catalyst that brought you to these pages in the first place.
Think freely or die.
You'll get a much needed crash course and classically liberal principles that stand the test of time.
Yada, yada, yada, yada.
And then freely or die.
Stop worrying about whether you're a Nazi.
Oh my God.
No, you're joking.
That is not real.
No.
No.
Stop.
That is a fucking, that is a joke.
That isn't truly.
If I was writing a parody book about some right-wing nut that wrote a book about, oh my God, stop worrying if you're no.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Stop worrying about being a Nazi because that's clearly like if you keep getting called a Nazi, don't analyze whether or not you're doing Nazi shit.
Just accept that like that it means nothing to be called a Nazi that like you're basically saying.
You don't even consider for a second.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like, don't worry if someone calls you a racist.
You're fine.
Like don't worry.
Yeah.
Oh my gosh.
I, Dave Rubin, have declared you fine.
Yeah.
Check your facts, not your privileges.
Please don't tell me this book did well.
If this book did well, I'm truly signing off.
Yeah, I think it, I don't know.
I think it did.
It did okay.
I don't think it was like a giant national bestseller.
Let's see here.
You can probably pull that up pretty fast.
Oh, it's new.
It's like universal.
I didn't realize it was 2020.
Yeah.
I didn't realize it was 2020.
Yeah.
Progressive woke machine from outrage.
Oh my God.
I can't read the book.
Yeah, I know.
It's incredibly frustrating.
Yeah, I mean, it's not fucking a lot.
It came out not that long ago.
It's like number almost 5,000 in Barnes and Noble.
It's like 40 or 50,000 in Amazon.
Like, I don't think it's...
It's five out of five.
Oh, fuck you.
Yeah, I mean, you have your friends all.
Like, it's not, it has not been, you know, the giant success that I think he hoped it would.
They were hoping it would, like, clearly this book is angled at like converting a bunch of people to the right.
And I don't think it did that.
Yeah.
Stop hating America, the West, and straight white men.
One of the motivations you'll have to stand up against the mob is that you'll love your country, the straight white men within it, and Western values in general.
In fact, you'll know that America isn't perfect, nor can any nation ever be, but that she has granted more people more freedoms than any other country in the history of the world.
You'll also know that straight white men aren't evil.
It's actually racist and sexist to believe so, and that Western values are rooted in individual rights or the cornerstone of free societies.
And again, this is like he talks about how you have to have your facts straight and go into a debate with facts.
But of course, he doesn't like do that with this, where number one, nobody in any sort of prominent position anywhere on the left is saying that straight white men are evil.
They're saying that like the concept of whiteness is fundamentally toxic and we need to reorient our societies away from it.
And also the idea that Western values rooted in individual rights are the cornerstones of free society ignores a couple of things.
You want me to list a couple of those things?
Yeah.
In the 1770s, when the British conquered India and then starved between 30 and 40 million people to death in order to maximize the profits of the British East India Company, that was not rooted in individual rights, was it?
Not super rooted in individual rights.
When the European powers took over basically the entire Middle East and partitioned it up without asking any of the people who lived in the former Ottoman Empire where they wanted to live in the Sykes-Picot Agreement and then forced a lot of them under dictators in order to maximize oil revenue.
That was not like, you know, super respectful of individual rights.
When the United States had Salvador Allende assassinated or a lot of other leaders assassinated in Central America and then backed death squads through the schools of the America, killing hundreds of thousands of people and leading to mass rape campaigns, including the burning alive of numerous nuns.
That was also not rooted in respect for individual rights.
You might say Western values have never been rooted in individual rights and have instead been rooted in plundering the rest of the world for the wealth of the West, who get to have individual rights as long as they don't criticize the plundering of the world.
Anyway, fun David Rubin.
I brought some facts, Dave.
We can talk about those if you want.
I'll go on your show.
He'll never agree to any type of back and forth.
It will just expose him, right?
Okay, but I will say I'm skimming through these reviews on Amazon.
Oh, yeah.
I want to throw up.
Oh, are they just cloying?
They're overwhelmingly positive.
I'm sure he must have bought some of them.
I refuse to believe this many idiots exist in the world.
But there's this really long one that's near the top that is basically a five-star review.
This book can change your life.
It talks about how he used to be, he used to call himself a feminist and how feminists in his own life canceled him because of arguments about the crime of rape.
And this is.
Oh, boy.
Oh, boy.
I wonder what those arguments were.
God.
Well, I can continue if you're curious.
Yeah, please.
No, I want to know what this guy.
I want to, I want to know this Dave Rubin fan's hot take on rapes.
Well, okay, this is like the third or fourth, those are the fourth paragraph down of this essay review.
It says, the first line of it is, I had never heard of David Rubin when I was a fan of the Young Turks.
And while I still called past tense, I called myself a feminist.
Feminists in my own life canceled me for numerous reasons or attempted to in parentheses.
One of the arguments was over the crime of rape, as in rape is a heinous crime that has best practices for prevention and resistance, just like preventing and resisting the crime of murder, where men number upon its primary victims.
The audacity that one would talk about preventing rape as if the solution is not to simply tell men to rape less.
We have laws against such things.
And these simple school marm admonitions, surprise, don't work on rapists.
This got me canceled by more people than I can count, including one person who I had the displeasure of seeing introduce Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins for one of their gatherings.
By this time, I had taken a major dose of the red, I had a major dose of the red pill and I was seeking some type of comfort.
Was I crazy?
Could I be literally Hitler because I dared think out of the doctor of what they did this lockstep?
They can't.
Enter David Rubin.
Oh my God.
And then the rest of it is enter David Rubin and how this man changed his life.
Oh my God.
People, for the most part, aren't called.
I don't believe people have been calling him literally Hitler for his controversial stance on rape.
I think they've been like, dude, what the fuck?
Like, why are you so adamant about arguing with everybody about rape?
And like, what is it?
What is wrong with you?
What is wrong with you?
Oh, my God.
Also, apparently he dedicated the book to Ben Affleck.
Dave Rubin did?
That's what Chad says on Amazon.
It's that real.
That seems like it's got to be a joke.
I have to look.
I have to double check this, Ben.
Oh, it is.
It is for Ben Affleck.
I'm sure that's some sort of joke that we don't get because we don't watch his terrible show.
I don't know.
That's horrible.
Well, no, it's not.
Fuck Ben Affleck.
Like, I don't think Ben Affleck believes anything other than having a gigantic, hideous tattoo of a Phoenix on his back, which, in fairness to Ben Affleck, is more of a commitment than Dave Rubin has ever made to anything controversial.
Like, you got to give Affleck credit.
It is not a cowardly decision to have the tattoo that he has.
That is a commitment.
That is a commitment to the type of person you are going to be, if anything else, let alone the tattoo itself.
I will say, I'm not an Affleck fan.
The only thing that Affleck that I respect Affleck for is, I think it was like in 2014 or something, but I dislike Bill Maher a lot.
Yeah, he's a piece of shit.
I hate Bill Maher.
But when he was on his show and Bill Maher was being his regular Islamophobic self, Ben Affleck fought back against him on his show.
And he was like one of the only commentators on the stage that was like really upset or something and like fought back pretty hard.
So I really respected him for that reason.
But as a regular person, I, yeah.
I will say of Ben Affleck, and this is actually my favorite thing about Ben Affleck, is that he looks like a man who committed that despite his fame and despite being classically handsome most of the time, and despite like the legions of adoring fans he's had throughout aspects of his career, he committed to never not being the kind of guy who would throw empty cans of steel reserve at his television at four in the morning.
And that's what his back tattoo represents.
Like, Phoenix rising out of the ashes.
Yeah, and then hucking a steel reserve can at the television because he's angry at it.
That's Ben Affleck.
I will say, I don't find him attractive in the slightest, but no, but clearly he must have to someone, right?
He had that whole crazy thing.
I think people made him Batman, whatever.
Like, apparently, he is, he ticks some boxes for some people.
But people want to fuck Ben Affleck, and that's fine.
Ben Affleck is this classic example of white men just needing to be above a certain height to be considered attractive, in my opinion.
This has just turned into a Ben Affleck Stan podcast.
Stan?
No.
Stan.
I mean, I can't think of a single movie he's been in where I actually cared about his appearance at all, but I love the pictures of him like shirtless and out of shape, drunk and staring out at things.
I will say, yeah, there's something tragically beautiful about that.
Yeah, I admire that greatly because I have that energy myself a lot of the time.
Just like, fuck this shit.
I'm going to drink a 40.
And those are some of the best.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Yeah, it's pretty great.
We're talking about Ben Affleck right now because Dave Rubin sucks so bad that we're all thinking like, ah, Ben Affleck, there's a person that I digitally.
I dedicated his book to him.
So that is kind of weird.
It is relevant.
It's interesting.
You know what's better than Dave Rubin and a more honest intellectual thinker than Dave Rubin?
Legalizing Controversial Substances00:14:40
Raytheon.
Exactly.
Raytheon.
Well, Dave Rubin vacillates and refuses to commit and just lets fascists talk over him and platforms them.
Raytheon doesn't platform anybody.
They just build missile guidance systems that kill people in Yemen.
And you know what?
I don't have...
Let's roll the rest of the ads.
Okay.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
And speaking of backs, I spent the ad break looking at that picture of Ben Affleck's unbelievable back tattoo, which I, I, at no point in my life will I ever have had enough of realizing that in everything Ben Affleck's ever done, that's been underneath his shirt all the time.
You can't escape it.
You can't escape it.
All right, let's read what Dave Rubin has to say about drugs.
I've done a pretty decent amount of drugs in my day, which is a sign that someone's either done no drugs or only done cocaine.
I've danced poorly on ecstasy and probably a couple of other things.
These days, I'm a red wine and indica guy, but I don't deny my past.
Actually, I have some great memories of it.
Yada, yada, yada, yada.
Okay.
Anyone that calls magic mushrooms magic mushrooms has never done shrooms.
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
So he's talking, he's doing like a standard libertarian thing about how like it's, we should just legalize this stuff, which is fine.
Like it's the standard libertarian thing you've got to go through.
Yada yada yada.
Okay, the catch is that this libertarian inspired view falls apart when it starts to include schedule one substances such as crack and heroin, which are obviously very different.
Crack is just cocaine.
Like David, crack is just a form of cocaine.
You're just criminalizing the version that you think black people tend to do.
Like he has no idea about the history of crack and why it's called crack.
And we're like, yeah, like, I don't know, man.
Like, what a fucking job.
But no, these are the drugs that need, that need the lightest possible touch of government to criminalize them.
Because freedom can't be a free-for-all, he writes.
And we don't want a breaking bad episode happening next door.
Well, if methamphetamine were, say, manufactured by the government in the way that certain Schedule I narcotics are in parts of Europe and were distributed to people who need, like, take it and, you know, that were like a thing that they could do and get a consistent product and not have to deal with drug dealers, then maybe there wouldn't be as much street crime.
And maybe because they're going into like government facilities where there's nurses and stuff, people could actually get health care and hopefully eventually get off of meth, which is how they've treated heroin addiction very successfully in parts of Scandinavia.
But like Dave, again, the guy who talks about coming armed with facts doesn't.
He just talks about how, oh, okay.
So he talks about how bad and scary San Francisco is because of meth and opiates.
And that's why the government needs to criminalize those drugs is because San Francisco is scary.
And which is like, I fucking grew up in Dallas, dude.
Like there's parts of Dallas, like San Francisco's got its sketchy neighborhoods largely because there's just a lot of houseless people who the local city government and like the NIMBY type rich folks don't want to help.
But like fucking hang out in Dallas or fucking Atlanta or like a whole every city.
Yeah, anyone that calls San Francisco scary has lived a very privileged life, to say the least.
It's it's yeah, it's a mix of like what they consider scary.
Like, right?
It's uh in in a lot of the deep south, you deal with more meth shacks in San Francisco.
You're more likely to find needles on the ground.
But it's like, yeah, all of them are symptoms of the fact that our society has serious problems.
It's not the fault of the actual individual substances because we know that that's not how it's like our society has failed so many people.
And it's just not the fault of those people.
It's the fault of the society at large.
But then making it sound like they are the reasons why a city is scary.
That is so problematic.
Yeah, it's the whole, it's the whole, like Dave's whole argument basically is that like, I think the drugs that white people do should be illegal.
Of course.
Or the least that I see white people doing should be legal.
So yeah, this whole section is basically him explaining why like if you support things like gay marriage and that kind of stuff, you're a classical liberal like him.
Although you should still support people who are caught with heroin or meth being put in prison rather than receiving treatment because San Francisco is scary.
Dave Rubin is a is a consistent guy.
Oh God.
Okay.
Here's his views on abortion.
No.
Before this process started, I'd always been solidly pro-choice, though in the last two years or so, I've begun to describe myself as begrudgingly pro-choice.
After you're learning more about the biology of gestation and the process of abortion and seeing the left fetishize it in a way I'm not comfortable with, there are countless videos on YouTube of women celebrating their termination while organizations such as shout your abortion encourages Twitter users to do the same with carefree abandon.
Okay, I sorry, I started vomiting when you said the word gestation.
Yeah.
Oh my God.
Yeah, it's it's him.
It's him, number one, like willfully misunderstanding like the difference between people being like, hey, you shouldn't be ashamed if you've had an abortion.
People need to be more open about that fact so that like they, there's less stinging around it.
Like you're not saying like, yay, I love the fact that I got an abortion.
It's fun.
Let's go get another.
Nobody like enjoys that process, but there's no shame in it.
That's the whole bunch of that shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just a thing.
There's like you're normalizing like talking about it and being open about it makes it less of a taboo and makes it less less of something that you feel shame around.
It's not about being proud that you terminated a pregnancy.
It's about normalizing, even seeking it out.
And so it's not this shameful taboo topic.
It's this thing that conservatives keep doing with like, they do it with sex education too, where like if you're, if you're in favor of like kids getting better sex education, then you're in favor of sexualizing children.
It's like, no, like you shouldn't even be telling kids that like sex is good or bad.
Should just be explaining very simply what it is, how it works, how their bodies work.
Like, it does, it should be, it should be like learning about the fucking Falklands invasion or whatever.
It should be just another fucking class.
Like, this is your body.
This is how it works.
This is how this all like we're not, nobody's sexualizing kids trying to teach them shit.
Yes, it is.
It's sex.
It should not be this thing we only talk about behind closed doors.
Like, normalizing, talking about it starts, it should start very young and it should start just as an educational thing.
And conservatives make everything about be like, they just twist it.
They twist it so strangely.
Yeah.
All right.
This is a terrible book.
Let's move down to the fucking Nazi.
Okay.
I want to see some of these headings.
Don't worry, you're not a Nazi.
Oh, God.
Don't worry.
You're not a Nazi.
That's what someone says.
He is a Nazi.
Congratulations.
I have fantastic news.
You are not a Nazi.
You may be wondering how I know this, considering we've probably never met.
But trust me, I know what's vital going forward is that you know this too.
You don't know David.
He's like making it sound like if you're reading this book, you're a good person.
You're smart enough to not be in that position.
Because you bought this book by me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So he goes into how like Nazis were actually socialists.
People have totally rewritten history on the matter.
No, they haven't.
They just understand that it was like a branding sort of thing.
And that there was a left wing of the Nazi party that all got murdered in the night of long knives.
That's what that was, David.
Was the left wing of the Nazi Party all getting killed?
But again, none of these people have ever, oh, yeah.
He Twitters or he talks about how Hitler was on the left because he was an art-loving vegetarian.
And that he wooed voters away from Germany's social democrat and communist.
Most of Hitler, like the core of Hitler's support, came from the German conservatives.
I'm pretty sure he just called Hitler.
The monarchists and the right wing.
But okay.
Like, again, just completely.
And like, here's, okay, so this is funny.
So he talks about how Mussolini also has to have clearly come up from been a left-wing guy because he started out as a left-wing journalist, which is true.
Mussolini was initially a socialist and a left-winger, like Dave Rubin.
Then he became a fascist, like Dave Rubin.
Kind of glossed over that fact.
Oh, cool.
He just talks about how real Nazis hated gays and Jews to the point of mass extermination of them, which is true.
Nazis killed a lot of gay people.
Let's talk about Ernst Röhm.
You've heard of the Brown shirts, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
They were Hitler's street fight.
His proud boys.
These are guys who go out in the street and murder left-wing activists.
They were his like his enforcers, the like violent arm of the Nazi electoral movement.
The head of the SA, the head of the brown shirts, was an a flamboyantly and fairly openly gay man named Ernst Röhm, who was caught when Hitler decided he had to kill him because the Nazis had gained power and they wanted to purge the left and Rome was an embarrassment because he was gay.
They found him at like a giant orgy at a castle with a bunch of his like his like boy toys and stuff.
And he like he, it like the Nazis had a ton of gay members early on.
They killed them all after they got into power, which might be a warning to fucking Dave Rubin.
Like when you truck with these people who hate you, they will use you while you're valuable for them to get in power and then they'll put you in a camp or just have you shoot yourself in a prison, David.
Actually read some history.
He's like mapping out his own demise unknowingly.
Exactly.
Wow.
Oh man.
Yeah.
These people are very frustrating.
I do like that he that he said that Hitler was on the left because he was an art-loving vegetarian.
He just basically called him a hipster, right?
Like it's like, I don't know, just like the weirdest thing to be like, to prove a point.
Yeah.
He does point out that someone on Twitter said Dave Rubin isn't a Nazi.
It's just that he'd sit across from Himmler and say, interesting a lot, which is actually pretty accurate.
Wow.
Yeah.
It's good stuff.
I can't believe he's so that idiotic to not realize that he people will, he can only go so far with the shtick, I feel like, right?
Hitler as a Hipster00:03:38
Yeah.
Yeah, and it does seem like he's kind of running to the end of his griff.
Now, he did get very rich.
We'll see how long that lasts and how long he's able to like carry some of this shit for.
But I don't think he's going to have a super long career after this.
Especially if hopefully things go well in the election.
I mean, we'll fucking see.
But even now, like with Trump in power, like as always happens to these guys, he has rapidly lost influence because Dave Rubin was only ever valuable as a vehicle to like push these far-right thinkers, just like all the other intellectual dark web guys.
And now that it's become mainstream to just openly call for the executions of your political opponents and the installation of a dictatorship among the right, there's not a whole lot of need for classical liberals, you know?
Yeah.
I don't know.
We'll see.
Maybe I'm wrong.
I hope not.
I hope you're right.
I mean, I trust your instincts.
I hope this is the last time I'll ever have to talk about him.
But yeah.
God, what a garbage man.
Yeah, he's trash.
And I think we're done talking about him.
Wait, I don't want to.
Wait, sorry.
I insulted actual people that work as garbage men.
That's not what I meant.
Oh, no, no.
Garbage men are awesome.
Yeah.
No, one of the most important jobs in the entire fall of civilization.
Yeah, he is a man made of garbage.
Yes.
Yeah, that's what I meant.
He is like a pile of trash.
He's not a garbage man.
A garbage man would remove him to a dump and thus carry out an incredibly necessary role in modern civilization.
An act of service to help us all.
Yeah, thank you, garbage men and women and non-binary garbage people of all sorts.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just want to clarify before someone jumped on me, me saying that term.
Yeah.
Nothing but love for garbage people here, but not people made of garbage.
We're going to need to work on some of the language here, but that can happen later.
Shireen, you got any pluggables to plug?
Pluggables to plug.
Well, you can follow me along the interwebs if you want.
I'm Shiro Hero on Instagram, S-H-E-E-R-O-H-E-R.
And then on Twitter, it's Shiro Hero666.
Yeah, and I have a podcast called Ethnically Ambiguous.
And I'm writing a second poetry book.
My first one is out there somewhere.
But yeah, I am trying to work on more films.
So if you want to see what I come up with, follow me along if you want.
And if you don't, I get it.
Well, follow Shireen.
And what?
I don't know.
I was going to have a joke, but I don't have a joke.
I don't have a joke to end this on.
Make your own fucking jokes, people.
What?
You think I owe you a joke right now just because you listened to my episode?
I'm sorry.
I'm getting abusive now, and that's not good.
Jesus Christ.
Think back to the image, Robert.
Think back to the beach, the tattoo, just to go back there.
Yeah, fucking Ben Affleck bent over, belly spilling out, giant Phoenix tattoo on his back, and a 40th steel reserve in his hands.
Just the saddest man who's ever lived.
God, I love him.
Robert, you kind of went Robert Evans left bad there.
Oh, no.
What's that?
Oh, yeah.
Well, yeah.
Watch me on Fox News for my new show, Left Equals Bad, filmed on my private island that I bought with the $80 million they gave me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Those flight logs.
Gotta watch out.
Well, listen now, we don't need to talk about, okay, episode's done.
Financial Literacy Month00:02:27
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wild Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they failed.
Listen to Eating Wild Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
If you're watching the latest season of the Railhouse Wise of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
Portia accusing Kelly of sleeping with the Mary Man.
They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew.
Pinky has financial issues.
On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Railhouse Wise franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the tea everybody's talking about.
To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgetista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.