Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan dissect systemic hypocrisy—from Chris Christie’s obesity to Hollywood’s left-wing ideological attacks on critics like Sam Harris, exposing distorted narratives (e.g., falsely linking him to nuclear strikes) while ignoring Obama’s drone wars or industrial farming’s ethical failures. Rubin’s stand-up evolution and Rogan’s Disney deal highlight how personal struggles and financial freedom shape authenticity, contrasting with crutch-dependent comedians who lose credibility. They conclude: superficial judgments and performative activism fracture progress, while genuine self-sufficiency—whether in food, thought, or relationships—demands real accountability over empty gestures. [Automatically generated summary]
We are here to celebrate the fact that Chris Christie got kicked off of a quiet train this morning for talking on his phone while drinking a McDonald's strawberry shake.
Is that actually- I haven't done any MRIs or operations on these people.
I thought we were going to go heavy medical- It's been explained to me Dave Rubin the skin is flexible and if you just keep stretching that bitch out it's clearly when with these people like I have a friend and His friend is a friend of mine as well But a good friend of his and he was about he's about to go do this and I said Please try to talk him out of it because you don't need surgery.
You just need to change your life and Because the surgery is only going to fix the physical aspect of it.
There's a reason why you're stuffing all this sugar and fat, and you're addicted to food.
So you need to find out what it is, what's going on.
We do, in America, we do high fructose corn syrup.
I don't know if to illuminate you on this, but in our Coke, in our can of Coke, because it's cheaper to put corn in it, to sweeten it, we're drinking corn instead of sugar.
You know, like, that's how dumb people have become about food.
We were talking a little bit about food before we started, but, like, it's really, it's like the most important stuff, what you put into your body so that then you can function on this earth.
And we're so warped, we got corn instead of sugar.
Even just now.
So I told you, I drank like 17 coffees before, but I didn't put any.
The Klen, I think, is supposed to really just lean you out.
It's a bodybuilder thing.
And the Stenosanol allows you to keep mass on, or helps you, assists you in keeping mass on when you cut weight.
So for fighters that are trying to be the biggest in their weight class, they're dehydrating themselves, but they want to keep as much muscle mass as possible.
I mean, I see it with these guys, and it's like, you know, they're doing this just so that they can get somebody that has a better body than them, so they can fuck, and then they move on to the next one.
It's like this endless game, you know what I mean?
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Like, I got a hot body, he's got a hot body, I'll fuck him, now I moved it.
These overly tanned, hair-plugged guys that are 70 years old and they're still at the gym hoping that that 28-year-old is looking at them.
And instead they're staring at everyone and gawking at them horribly.
It's all gross...
It's really sad, and we can get into this a little later, but it also shows me why the gay marriage thing was so important.
Because these are, I actually have a lot of empathy for these people, although I can, you know, it's easy to make fun of.
But, like, if you couldn't ever enter a relationship that then is, you're gonna build, like, what you have with your wife, where you can build a life, you know?
And as many guys as possible, rotations, different ones texting you all day long, trying to put it together, trying to figure out when you could squeeze the time in.
Or, you know, you could try to fill yourself up with that and, you know, be married and have kids and, you know, and have that part of your life achieve normalcy.
Or you can do the super tan, roided up, Dick-sucking rampage that those guys that work out at Gold's Gym on Coal.
I can't tell you, especially when I was younger and I was single, how many fucking girls that I dated who would work with some guy who would say, well, Mike from the office says, I'd be like, Mike's trying to fuck you!
Because this drive to procreate, and not even on a conscious level.
It's not like, oh my god, I have to get this girl pregnant and have a baby.
It's like, I gotta come inside of her.
I have to come.
I have to figure out how to get this person to touch my body and create pleasure.
You don't take the objective steps to recognize, oh, this is a gigantic biological trick that's been set in place by nature because it was really hard to survive just a few thousand years ago.
It was insanely hard to survive, and you had to make sure you made as many people as possible so that they made as many people as possible so we can keep this retarded party going.
I've only seen clips of it, but I had a bit that people accused me of stealing from Idiocracy, but luckily I did the bit before Idiocracy came out, so I got grandfathered in.
That's the that's the comedians dilemma when you're doing good shit so that ten years later Everyone's like oh you must have stole that and you're like no no no I did that ten years ago Well, it wasn't that close.
It was just the concept that many people have had is that dumb people are out breeding smart people That's the that's the movie mine was that explain the pyramids My thing was that the idiot pyramid workers would show up one day and go I suppose get my check on Friday.
Oh Where is everybody?
But all the smart people who figured out how to build the pyramids had already died.
So the people just moved into the pyramids.
Like, why we live in these mud houses when we can live in the pyramids?
So they moved into the pyramids and pretended they built it.
And there's this long thing that sort of explains what's going on today.
I used to be afraid when I was closeted, like, in high school and college.
Because I didn't come out until really my mid to late 20s.
But I used to be afraid of Abercrombie& Finch, because they used to have those shirtless, you know, like these shirtless hot guys standing outside, and I felt that they would know.
Like, I just thought, like, these guys are gonna know that I'm gay.
Dave Rubin, why he's everything that's wrong with gay people today.
I mean, you would get those kind of articles and just twisting and distorting your real positions to make social brownie points to appeal to the hardest of hardcore aggressive social justice warrior lefties.
Well, this poor guy, he's not hanging in there well.
Robert Redford, that motherfucker's hanging in there well.
He's hanging in there well.
He's obviously an old dude, but he doesn't look like a monster.
My kid has a gymnastics class, and there's this There's a poor unfortunate woman who goes to this gymnastics class.
She looks like she's quite wealthy.
She's always dressed very well.
But she's got what I call monster face.
And monster face is when they shoot their face up with filler and then they do the lips and then they pull their face back so they have this sort of reptilian mouth where their mouth is way too big.
And it's way too big because they're pulling this fucking skin so the opening of their mouth doesn't match a normal person's face because it's bigger.
It stretches like this guy's Chris Christie's stomach.
Well, I think the idea is that if you get in the water, like instantly all the work that you've done with hairspray to lock this fucking monster in place, it all dissolves with the water and you leave behind an oil slick.
But when you get in the water with one of those wacky wigs, the little hair club jammies, the idea is that nobody can tell.
But don't you think they should have to show, like, when they show you the pill, and then everyone's running in a field, it's all that bullshit marketing nonsense.
Yeah, that's one thing if you're advertising a car, right?
You know, if you've got, like, the newest Cadillac, and it looks cool, and you're driving, you look cool driving, like, man, I want to get one of those!
That's sort of okay.
But if it's another thing, if it's some crazy...
You remember there was a drug that they were selling for a while they were advertising that was a supplement to your current antidepressant?
But there's something fucked up about advertising for something that's a drug that can affect your mind and possibly cause suicidal thoughts, because advertising is entirely designed to coax you into buying the product.
His last name was Ruben, which is why I went to him.
And then I just didn't like him.
And I was like, fuck this.
I'm not going to do it.
But anyway, I just figured, all right, instead of taking one a day, I'll just do one every other day and then one every three days, something like that.
And it worked.
I weaned off it.
I kid you not.
I swear to God this is true.
I remember when you used to turn on an old computer, like an old desktop computer, all the whirring and the buzzing and you'd hear the hard drive spinning and all that shit.
I could feel that in my brain for about two weeks when I got off it.
And especially as an artist, as someone that speaks and is supposed to have a full set of emotions and be able to go on stage, tell people what I think.
You know, that's the argument with school shooters.
One of the things about school shooters is a massively disproportionate amount of them are on psych meds.
And the idea is that they can do that.
And, you know, what came first?
Is it the disease, the mental illness that causes them to be able to shoot somebody in the first place?
Or is it the fact that they're on pills?
Is it the fact that they're on pills because they're mentally ill?
Who the fuck knows?
Yeah.
People that I know that have been on various antidepressants, SSRIs or whatever, they tell you that things don't bother them.
So if things don't bother them, like shooting people, like the lack of empathy, it seems to me, my armchair psychology position, that there would just be a correlation there.
I mean, the other problem is there's so many guns out there that the people that are doing this shit, like this last guy in Oregon, I think he didn't get the gun.
Yeah, well, I definitely want to get into that with you because that's become, like, my home now.
This is really the split.
on the left between what I'm calling the regressives and People that I think really stand for liberal principles.
That's all on the left But yeah, I have some you know, I have a lot look comedians in general I think have hugely strong libertarian leanings because you want to be I'm a firm believer that the government should have very little to do With our lives.
Yes, make sure I don't get shot which they're not that great at that You know, take care of the economy.
Keep us safe.
Like, that pretty much is what I think the government's role should be.
I believe that instead of looking at his actual positions and being objective and saying, does he have a point?
What is his point?
Let's debate the point.
Let's debate the merits of the point.
Instead, he's a guy that you can point to and say, well, he has a strong position about Islam, so he is Islamophobic, he is therefore racist, and he should be attacked and fuck that piece of shit.
I mean, I've seen the same written about Christopher Hitchens.
I saw some people when he died that were writing good riddance, and I made fun of this one social justice warrior because he was saying good riddance to Hitchens, but then when Osama bin Laden died, he was like, I am not going to celebrate the death of any human being.
I'm like, well, this is fucking hilarious.
I know what you're doing.
You're not thinking.
You're not thinking.
You're writing things.
And this is part of the problem with social media.
And I think one of the things that we're finding with this whole social justice warrior issue is that it's not necessarily just opinions.
It's opinions that are being expressed in a way where they know people are going to hear it.
They know people are going to see their writing.
And so that knowledge that someone's going to see what you're writing and react to it, either positive or negative, affects your choices.
It's like reality TV. And what they're doing is like, when you see people act fake on reality TV because you know that they know the cameras are on them, that's what you're doing when you make a retarded social justice warrior tweet.
But his principles and his opinions are he will truly express them.
And in unpopular subjects, like when you're talking about Islam or you're talking about religion in general, I mean, he takes a tremendous amount of heat about that.
And what they're really doing is just trying to take the moral high ground.
They're trying to take his position of being like, first of all, if Ben Affleck had a real nuanced and objective position, he certainly didn't express it on that show.
It sucks because all these subjects are massively important and have a bunch of people shouting over each other.
Like here, you and I have very strong opinions and we want to express ourselves and there's only two of us, luckily.
Because if there was five of us in the room right now and we're all talking, it would be really hard to fucking get your points across.
Because you've got to kind of like jump in and this is what happens when you get a guy like Sam Harris and a guy like Ben Affleck and Ben Affleck, what you're saying is so racist.
It's so racist.
Instead of having an hour to go, okay, well, why don't you tell me why it's racist and give me your thoughts in the Middle East and tell me what you would do about, you know, X amount of people who are so entangled in their ideology that they want death upon people.
They wish death upon people who leave the religion.
Tell me what you would do about that.
Tell me what you would do about people that think that it's wrong to have women go to school.
Tell me what you would do about- we're talking about ideologies.
You can call it Islam, you can call it the Moonies, you can call it Scientology, you can call it whatever the fuck you want, but what it really is, is a rigid set of ideologies.
These are ideologies that you are forced to subscribe to a predetermined pattern of behavior and thinking.
And if you are not in that predetermined pattern of behavior and thinking, they wish death upon you.
And they think that they should be able to stone you if you're a homosexual.
They should be able to stone you if you're an adulterer.
There's a horrible video online of this poor woman whose father throws the first rock.
Where it's just Bill sitting down with these people and not being forced into that fucking soundbite-y type of conversation because that's what they're doing.
Well, I think the entertainment aspect of those shows where there's like five people in a room and then also you have a fucking audience that cheers when they agree.
And during his show, he does do that when people chime in.
But I just think that the entertainment aspect of expressing yourself almost sometimes takes precedent over the concepts and the ideas themselves because it's all in how you deliver it and how forcefully you can get it past the other people that are trying to say contrary points.
I would probably say that idea is racist before I would even say you're racist because I got to think that some people will say, well, I have black friends.
Well, what do you like about black people?
You go into that and at the end of it, well, they smell different.
I like to be around people that are dumber than me.
But that illustrates your point perfectly, that the problem with these shows and the problem with this discussion and problem with social justice, it's all like a perfect storm of craziness.
Because the next day after that show, all the online sites, Mediate, everybody, the headlines were all, Ben Affleck calls Bill Maher and Sam Harris racist.
So suddenly the onus was on them to prove that they're not racist.
That is, not only is that bonkers, but I asked Sam about this and he said something that I thought was fascinating.
He was on that show to discuss his book called Waking Up, which is a spiritual guide to, it's a guide to spirituality without religion.
So he's talking about meditation, he's talking about inner peace.
I've read the book, you know, like some pretty lofty stuff.
He said, from that point forward, the next six months of my life, we're on a book tour about inner peace, but all I had to do is defend myself that I'm not a racist.
Well, and it came from, I believe, Ben Affleck wanting to state a position that he felt would be very popular and would resonate and would get him social brownie points.
Yeah, just social brownie points.
Because what he said, the way he expressed himself, it's not nuanced, it's not objective, it's not complex and well thought out, and it's a very, very deep and important subject.
Massively important subject.
Because what we're talking about in 2015, when you're talking about any ancient religion, you're talking about clinging to these ideas that were formed and ingrained in these communities well before science, well before people had a deep understanding of human psychology,
of human nature, of the power of suggestion and culture, and well before we understood the way the world actually works as far as, like, As far as nature, as far as physics, as far as just the formation of the universe, all this information is not applicable to most of the religions in the world today.
If you really step back and dissect what you just said there, that if you took what the average person thought of the world and of science and of medicine and everything that we know of and food and everything in 1840...
By that standard now, in 2015, that person would look pretty damn dumb.
Yet for some reason, these books that were written thousands of years ago, thousands, whatever it is, somehow those have some validity that we should still respect.
We shouldn't respect these books.
They're ideas.
They're ideas that time has long since let go of.
So by respecting them...
We're actually doing something crazy.
If we really want to be free, if we want to be free thinkers and people that...
I don't give a fuck about anyone's race or religion or sex or sexuality.
I judge people on what they say and what they think.
And what the social justice warriors are doing, they're trying to win this argument by shutting everybody down.
And they're doing it...
I think there is a degree of them doing it for lofty reasons.
I think Ben Affleck thinks in his lofty, rich Hollywood, whatever, that he's...
There's always going to be a few Hollywood conservatives.
Obviously, Chuck Woolery is not in any big movies or anything like that, but there is always going to be a few conservatives in Hollywood, but the casting people, the producers, the executives, overwhelmingly left-leaning.
And to be in that club, you have to agree with them.
And there's a problem with that whole audition process when it comes to actors.
You can't work unless someone approves you, unless someone takes you in and accepts you and chooses you.
And you can't say anything controversial that will fuck that up.
And then you're essentially like you're on a dating program for the world.
Not dating like you're trying to get laid, but you're trying to get the world to love you.
So when a guy like Ben Affleck, who's been doing this his whole life, gets on that show and someone says something, then he thinks, I can get in here and make some fucking points.
I can get some social brownie points up on the board.
Well, counterculture, that you'd be really against the government, you'd be against the administration, you'd be fighting more for some of the things that I think we're doing with the social justice warrior stuff, fighting for free speech relentlessly, fighting against bad ideas.
So you could be fighting against the ideas of Islam without being racist or in a race, but without even being without being bigoted towards Muslim people.
Like right now, I think partially because of Obama, it's cool to like the president.
You know what I mean?
He's black.
He's cool.
I'd love to play basketball with him.
I'm sure he'd be fun to have a drink with.
So it's cool to like the power right now.
So in a weird way, I think if we have a Republican president next time, comedy is going to get a lot better real quick because it's going to be a lot easier to attack.
I know a lot of very smart comics that just think it's fucking gross that you've got a guy that's killed more innocent people with drones or been responsible for being the lead, the commander-in-chief of the greatest army the world has ever known that has caused thousands of people to die innocently through drone strikes.
They're shooting at cell phones.
They're shooting missiles at where a cell phone is.
There's a reason that Obama, you know, a lot of people on the left, the progressives, when Obama got in, immediately were like, you know, he has to try, you know, Cheney for war crimes and blah, blah, blah.
And there's a reason why he didn't that wasn't just about power.
It was also because he's killing a lot of people with drones right now.
And 20 years from now, he doesn't want that president, President Willow Smith or whoever it's going to be, to come in and be like...
And I'm watching Seinfeld, which should be the time that I can shut my brain down, right?
An episode that I've seen 150 times before, that I know every line coming out, and I have my iPad, and I have my iPhone, and my laptop's there, and I'm doing this, and it's like Minority Report from Hell.
You know?
And I really struggle with that, like, shutting it down sometimes.
And, you know, I'm not even just talking about the devices, but just actually the stuff that you're putting in your brain all the time.
Especially in these sort of conversations, like you and I, we exchange some emails about some stuff that'd be cool to talk about, but we don't have a format.
Obviously, we're all over the place.
We're gay discos, and Ben Affleck's a douche, and Bill Maher's formats are antiquated, and there's...
You can only have so much information in your head.
And this is part of the problem that I have with this Going Clear book.
Why I keep going to it and then going to other shit.
It's because I feel like, why am I fucking reading so much about this sociopath fucking nightmare crazy cult leader dude that has...
Formed this insane religion because part of me can't put it down.
Part of me I start reading about all the crazy shit that he did and how nutty this guy really was and how many people followed his wacky ideas.
And you've got a very different type of religion when, first of all, you're dealing with the environment that these people live in is extremely hostile, as far as the temperature is extremely hot, the battle for natural resources is very difficult, and you're also dealing with the cradle of civilization.
And I have this bit about Islam that never really came to fruition.
Not even Islam, but the Middle East, rather.
The Middle East is essentially like they're the townies of the world.
Because that's where culture was created.
And everybody, look, human beings were created in Africa.
Well, this is the strange thing about the neocons, right?
So neocons believe that we should use our American power to either nation-build or, you know, look, I know everyone on the left will say, well, they're doing it because we want their natural resources.
Like, again, it's one of these things that there's a zillion reasons why everyone wants some piece of that part of the world.
But...
People will say, well, Iraq was better off with Saddam.
He was doing horrible things to his people.
He was using mustard gas on the Kurds, right?
I think it was the Kurds.
So we've helped.
We've backed leaders.
Mubarak in Egypt was our guy.
We backed him.
Then they overthrew him.
Then we backed the Muslim Brotherhood.
Then they overthrew them.
Now we're backing another Mubarak guy.
Our policies are all crazy.
It's all military-industrial complex.
And it's just this endless cycle of craziness over there.
I mean, you can't get any crazier than having a guy like Dick Cheney as the vice president, who's the CEO of Halliburton, a company that rebuilds places that we blow up.
We hope that information and the distribution of information that's available today, that was barely available when Bush was in office, And we hope that the spread of that and the understanding of that will balance out all this shit.
And I'm hoping that that's the case with social justice warriors.
I'm hoping that's the case with these right-wing fucking fanatics that want to blow up and bomb and invade everything that doesn't believe in Jesus.
I'm hoping that all that stuff gets balanced out because I think the amount of change we've experienced in our lifetime is unprecedented.
Cultural change, informational change has been the big one.
The invention of the internet, I fully believe that when we go back and historians look at this point in time, they see it as an explosion of change.
Like a veritable explosion of ideas and of the ability to express themselves.
And your show represents that.
Your podcast represents that.
You don't have anybody telling you what to do.
You can talk about whatever you want.
There's no studio execs coming to go, stop, Dave.
We've got to get off this subject.
Dave, you can't talk about Ben Affleck.
We're doing a film with Ben.
One of our subsidiaries is very upset with this and that and that.
You know, the affiliates are calling in right now.
They want to cancel our program.
We're going to have to figure out a way to do this better.
You said some bad things about Abilify, and Abilify is one of our new sponsors, and you should ask your doctor about it because maybe you need it.
Well, because identity politics ultimately has to eat itself.
That's the fatal flaw.
So that they'll take someone like Bernie Sanders, who stands for every fucking progressive principle known to man.
He doesn't want money in politics.
He's everything that the left wants.
And what happens?
He has Black Lives Matter people grabbing the mic away from him a month ago screaming he doesn't care enough about black lives when there's no reason to believe that.
But if you parse everyone down to their one issue, so if you say that these people are only going to care about Black Lives Matter and these people are only going to care about abortion and these people are only going to care about Islam or whatever it is, Ultimately, you're just a group of people who ultimately have interests that have nothing to do with each other, and you're going to destroy each other.
And that's why I think the reaction to this is so good and so powerful.
At the same time, what did they probably end up doing?
I don't have any empirical evidence on this, but they probably ended up strengthening the people that don't like them.
You see what this is doing?
You know, so...
There's so much to it, but that's why I really, I think the social justice warrior thing, and it has a lot, the same thing in the way that they treated him.
I'm talking about, you know, Glenn Greenwald and Reza and my former boss, Cenk, who I know you've had on here.
The way these people treated him and this dishonest attack on ideas that it came from the left.
We're supposed to debate ideas, right?
We're on the left.
So what does liberalism stand for?
We believe in the debate of ideas.
You could say the people on the right, well, they're more dogmatic.
They're more religious.
They don't want to debate ideas.
So I can't deal with those people.
The right went off the deep end a long time ago.
What I have to care about as someone that's on the left and that believes in liberal principles and doesn't want to see gays thrown off the roof in Syria and all that shit It doesn't mean I want to invade Syria doesn't mean on a nation build But I should be able to talk about that without being called a racist or whatever it is And and I think we've we've hit something here I think one of the things that we've hit is there are people that are balanced and that are socially aware and that are fun and interesting to talk to and And then there's social retards.
Like whether it's Black Lives Matter or whether it's supporting gay rights or whether it's transgender rights or any of the ideas that I'm sure you and I could both agree with.
What they're doing and the way they're doing it is they found something that gives them the green light to be an asshole And one of the things they're doing in being an asshole is they're making up for being picked on They're making up for being rejected They're making up for the abuse that they've suffered at other people's hands that have caused them to have this Unbalanced social persona and that's what it's all about.
It's about social retards with really good points.
On my birthday, the Supreme Court said, you know, I was engaged already at the time, but I kind of liked the idea of getting gay married when it wasn't fully legal, because then I thought I'd be like running from the law or something like that had some sort of bad ass.
Yeah, I was It's gonna be like hunting a guy with one arm, you know, who killed my wife.
None of it made sense, but I had this idea of something in my head.
But anyway, if you take that movement, look, it happened pretty damn quick.
I know gay people have wanted rights for a long time, but if you take the last five years, the way this thing has evolved, and now it's cool, look, you're a straight white man.
But what I realized sort of halfway through that was it's not that the left really cares about gays as much as sort of this idea sort of of what you're talking about.
Because at the end of the day, now that gay people have equality, well, guess what?
Suddenly gay people might start voting Republican because they might want to vote on taxes.
So the identity politics thing is only good for a little while.
And then once everyone's equal, it's just...
It's just a way of pitting people against each other.
You're not this amazing person with this moral high ground that stands above and gets to proclaim how they've been fighting for rights and screaming and yelling and crying.
You're screaming and yelling and crying because you're socially retarded.
I think people sort of think that somehow I'm defending the right.
There is nothing I agree with these people on.
You know what I mean?
I have to clean my house and my house is on the left.
So I want the left to be better.
I fully believe now that the regressives, which is what the progressives have become, because their ideas are now regressive, not progressive, that they are the Tea Party of the left.
And if the Republicans, if the average conservative, whether you agree with them or not, five years ago when the Tea Party was gaining strength and we're not going to negotiate with anyone and government shutdowns and all that, if the average conservative had said, "These are our principles," whether you agree or not, "We believe in limited government," all that stuff, "low taxes," whatever, "We believe in limited government," all that stuff, "low taxes," whatever, "strong If they would have said that, they might have been able to reel the Tea Party in a little bit, but instead they just went to their worst, the worst piece of them.
And I see it happening with us on the left.
And that's why I'm so against the regressive left.
We got to bring them back because otherwise we're going to have the regressive left and we're going to have the Tea Party.
I think a lot of us, given different circumstances, could be swayed to have different points of view and different ideas.
And I'm also pulled, not in the sense like logically, but I find myself compelled when I see people that are really religious.
When I listen to like some Muslim guy That's speaking with great confidence about the power of Islam and the truth of Islam.
I find myself compelled.
I don't believe it.
I don't support it as an ideology, but I'm fascinated by the natural human compulsion to want to join that.
The natural human...
Something about someone who is unbelievably confident in what they're doing is the right thing and is proclaiming it publicly and loudly through a microphone that makes you go, wow, maybe he's right.
Ended because when I did that and then you can play a clip No, no, I'm not but I was gonna say that Sam snap he snapped I wouldn't say snap, but by his expression.
Yeah, he said snapped Yeah, that's how he described it too, but he expressed himself about what's really going on with these people whether it's Greenwald or I'll let him you know pick who it was and what it would but if you listen to it, it's the the thing the the Channel on YouTube is called secular talk.
Yeah, and the title of it is Sam Harris on progressivism torture religion and foreign policy It's fucking fantastic cuz he's so elegant so eloquent elegant as well, but eloquent and he just nails it Perfectly expressed what's going on?
Because what I see, when I did my sit down with Sam, I laid it out very clearly.
I said to him, Sam, let's take the five things that people misquote you about the most and let's make it very YouTube friendly so that when these crazy people are screaming about you, anyone on Twitter can be like, here's a link, give it five minutes.
So we did it.
And he laid out the profiling.
He laid out the nuclear first strike.
He laid out all Muslims.
Versus Islam, you know all that Islam is the mother load of bad ideas, which he did backtrack a little bit because again It's about it's about ideas not the slanders, right?
So that's how we laid it out and then we and then we did the whole thing and I felt when I was done with that sit down Again, this was my first episode of my show.
I was like I'm done with this topic I I felt I had added a little something to this I had helped the discourse a little bit and then suddenly right after that they all were worse I All of them.
Glenn, Reza, Cenk, they all doubled down.
Literally, Glenn retweeted a misquote from our interview that Sam said it was something about Sam mentions profiling and he's talking about Jerry Seinfeld.
He's talking about Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian Jerry Seinfeld, should not be profiled.
That this is a guy who should be able to walk right through because it's a silly use of resources.
Yes.
Glenn retweets something where they said people who look like Jerry Seinfeld.
Yeah, because he's a middle-aged man and if a middle-aged white guy, whatever, he's not even talking about the race in this instance, that if me or you, if me and you were right now going LAX, that we should be profiled.
They should look at two guys of a certain age and whatever their criteria are, not based on race or religion, but there should be some more, they should look at us in a more curious way than perhaps an 80-year-old Dutch woman That's in a wheelchair.
He's trying to have smart profiling or what he calls anti-profiling.
The problem with profiling, really, is you're getting profiled by people that are so fucking dumb they work for the TSA. That's a real issue.
Because I read this whole thing that they give people, recognizing facial expressions, like, get the fuck out of here.
Have you ever paused for a minute when you're looking for something and been a fly on the wall while the TSA agents are talking to each other about what they want to eat or what this bitch was saying to me?
Well, to that point, I mean, look, if we really wanted to profile in the way that profiling should be done, then you have to do it the way the Israelis do it, which is that they have cameras on everybody watching every bit of body language and every bit of nuance.
I mean, even I went...
I went to Israel, I think, in 97. And I, to get in, had to go in a separate room.
And they asked me every question you could possibly think of.
I'm a Jew from Long Island.
I was profiled.
You know what I mean?
They're not doing it out of fun.
They just don't want their planes to explode.
And I had to explain something about where my bar mitzvah was.
I mean, really crazy shit.
But I'm pretty sure they would prefer not to have to do that.
And I didn't walk away going, oh man, profiling, that's the worst thing in the world.
There are certain things that are...
This is a very...
Difficult discussion to have because the social justice warriors make it so that even when we're talking about this now There's this feeling that somehow I'm before profiling I mean I think they should just be ignored the the so-called social justice warriors and I think that as times going on they're becoming so ridiculous They're doing it themselves.
There's a great story that I tweeted a couple days ago anti-feminist speaker disinvited to Uncomfortable learning in quotes lecture series because she made students uncomfortable But don't they have safe spaces for that?
I think it's coming from the professors, partly for what you said before about Affleck.
Like, there's this idea, if you want to be a professor, sort of, and Gad Saad talks about this a lot because he is a college professor, and I know he's had his struggles as someone that is outing this bullshit.
I think he's had his professional struggles.
I think in our interview he talked a little bit about some exchanges he's had with other professors where they don't want to touch some of his ideas because of...
Not that he's talking about anything really controversial at the end of the day.
There's also a real problem in colleges, I believe, that these people that operate in academia have only worked in academia and they don't really understand the real world because they aren't in it.
And they're in a position of power with young people.
So their ideas have They have incredible influence.
They're standing on this stage teaching these lectures, teaching these classes, and they have these young, impressionable people that are listening to them.
This gives them a gigantic ego boost.
They have this platform, and they've never competed in the real world.
They've never contributed to the real world other than teaching children.
And there's a lot of them like that, that have gone through the educational system, and then gone from the educational system directly to teaching, and then this is their universe.
And these people are pretty much all part of the regressive left.
They are pretty much all part of it.
So you could think, here's a simple example of this.
So there's a difference between debating ideas and hate speech.
So let's say somebody that hated Muslim people, Wanted to speak at a college and was going to talk about how we should kick them out of the country or we should, whatever, do horrible things to them.
I could see absolutely protest that person.
Use your right of free speech and free assembly to protest that person's ideas.
Should the college not let them come?
You know, if it was purely hate, I suppose, but I know that's a really slippery slope because everyone, you know, versus you could take any of these people Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she's not against Muslim people.
She's against the doctrine, these ideas.
And if we can't make the distinction between hate speech and someone who wants to debate ideas, if you can't do that in college, Then where the hell else can you do that?
Not only that, try getting some inflammatory quotes by Ayaan Hirsi Ali that you could argue against that aren't really well thought out, that aren't articulate, that aren't based on her personal experiences growing up in this religion, her understanding of the scripture.
Because I could not believe that this person that I work for, who I respect, who I play basketball with every Sunday, that he was so dense to the ideas that Sam was portraying.
And at the end of it, just as I said to you before, that at the end of mine, I thought I had made this conversation a little bit better.
Cenk only doubled down on all of this shit.
Because they don't want to debate ideas.
They just want Sam to be discredited so that their ideas win.
And that's why we have to fight against it.
Because if Sam disappears, as I said earlier, if Sam disappears tomorrow, it's not about him.
It's about all the ideas that we'll all be afraid to talk about.
That's why Charlie Hebdo cartoons, you should be able to, Family Guy, can do whatever the fuck they want on Jesus, right?
Every episode, there's an episode where Jesus is bathing with porn music in the background in front of Stewie, a baby.
That was really perplexing to me because I usually feel like whether I agree with him or don't agree with him on other things, I feel like he's got an opinion.
He thinks about it.
He talks about it.
He tries to be open-minded.
He's passionate about these ideas.
But with that, it was so confusing to me because it was almost like he was just trying to win.
It was like he was trying to find a way to beat...
Someone who is, you know, Sam is an intellectual black belt.
I mean, like a high-level world champion black belt of the spoken word.
And I think that Cenk is not at the same level as Sam when it comes to debating these ideas.
Although I did do the main Young Turk show with him a lot...
Most of the time as I was on it was because he was out of town, so I was either filling in or something like that.
So there wasn't really the forum for that.
And then it really had a lot to do with why I left, because I just could not believe it.
I mean, there's people that have edited things where Cenk says one thing directly to Sam's face, and then days later is saying the complete reverse thing, sitting down with Reza Aslan and saying that yeah, he means all Muslims.
And it's like, you just said to his face, you just said to his face that you know that's not what he says.
And I think it's partly...
It goes to that Affleck thing that he's trying to be this...
He's trying to defend Muslim people that he feels are being abused.
And there's a lofty goal there somewhere.
But if you use the tactics of dishonesty and slander and smearing and all that to get there, you...
Trying to balance out X amount of months of disinformation, but I think that ultimately in the long run his ideas are more accurate They're more like what he's saying is well thought through and his opinions are better considered I think when you can that What is with who though?
I don't know either, but I think that when guys like Cenk do say things that are easily discredited when you say, like, look, you said this one thing two days ago when you were talking to Sam.
Now you're saying something completely different when he's not here.
That is so bad for people's perception of your ideas.
It's so bad for your own credibility.
It's so bad when you express opinions about other things.
Like, you can say something, like, as a comic, you can say things, and you can joke around them.
And I can know that you're joking, so I can, okay, he doesn't really believe that, and you're fucking around.
But this isn't fucking around.
So you're being held to your ideas.
You're held accountable for your ideas.
And when your ideas are massively inconsistent and contrary, days later, and when you're expressing an idea that you have to know is incorrect.
You know, look, Brian Williams made some stupid part ego mistake, part whatever you want to call it about being on the- They found like 15 different ones that they lied about.
But everything being equal, they weren't like cataclysmic lies in the scheme of...
You know what I mean?
In the scheme of things.
They were about his little adventures that he exaggerated, partly because of the media, because the media wants you to be a star, too.
So he has to go on The Tonight Show and talk about being on a helicopter, when actually, would Walter Cronkite have done that?
And I think they're really similar the Brian Williams thing and that like both Original stories were actually pretty impressive and these guys doctored them up and turned them into this epic thing that ultimately Cost them a shitload of credibility if not all their credibility with Brian Williams He was actually in a fucking helicopter in Iraq the helicopter in front of him was shot at So, like, that's scary as fuck.
When I listen to his opinions about things, I unfortunately have to take into consideration that he's been massively inconsistent about this one thing.
So when someone is caught or exposed or whatever you want to call it to have so severely misrepresented someone else's views, how are you able to separate that from the rest?
So let's say you like 80% of his views or anybody.
We don't have to make it about him.
How do you separate that?
Because I, at this point, I don't know how I do it at all.
And I know Sam has said that about Glenn, even when it comes to the NSA stuff.
He's like, I don't know what to make of that now because I know what this person is capable of.
And look, if someone came on here, if I come on here and I said something that was profoundly dishonest or was smearing of someone else, I would never hear the end of it.
Right.
And hopefully people would tag you on Twitter and you'd retweet the shit out of it until everybody had seen, you see what fucking Ruben did and whatever.
And he's talking about a horrific scenario where some ISIS-type civilization has control of nuclear weapons and there's a real threat that they're going to use them on other people.
Because then, all of a sudden, whatever goodwill and whatever love and appreciation people have for your ideas, that's going to go out the window when they find out that your ideas have been distorted.
That your points of view, rather, of other people's ideas have been distorted.
101. And then this guy online put together the actual conversation and Jamie's perception of the conversation, and it was, I forget, the Kielstein Delusion was the name of the video.
And because of that, he received so much fucking hate.
That made him aware of that, and he said it was like the low moment of his life, and he completely stopped doing that, and he doesn't do any of that shit anymore.
And, you know, he's rebounded, and now he's happier than he's ever been before.
But I think that that type of behavior is not just standard, it's accepted, it's almost expected.
You know, it's like what they do, and if you're part of that victim culture, the perpetual victim culture, that's how you do it.
You make it seem like people were yelling at you, and there was people, and they were so upset with me, and all I was yelling was trying to say that women shouldn't be raped.
The hate that you get online, especially if you're a super sensitive person that's really trolling for love.
You got all your fucking lines in the water, and you're trolling for love.
That's what you're doing.
And in saying that, and even becoming this victim, you're trolling for love.
I mean, that's what you're trying to do.
You're trying to get people to, fuck Joe Rogan, fuck that transphobic, homophobic, racist, sexist, misogynistic asshole.
Throw them all out there.
Throw them all out there.
I mean, but that's what's going on.
And you've got to realize that when you distort people's perceptions or distort people's positions for your own personal benefit, you do yourself a horrible disservice because you now have ruined any validity, anything that you have said in the past that may resonate with people.
You've ruined that because now you've poisoned that well.
Sam would argue that because these are debatable ideas, we should debate them.
So imagine if subsequently, so they do the three-hour sit-down, he and Cenk, and after that, instead of saying, he wants to profile Muslim people and blah, blah, blah, and all that bravado and bullshit and whatever, imagine if he had said, you know, Sam and I really disagree on this.
I fear that Sam's use of anti-profiling or profiling, whatever you want to call it, I fear that ultimately it will lead...
If, you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, I think that he's trying to do something good, but ultimately it's going to lead to Muslim people feeling persecuted, feeling like the other.
If he had laid that out like that and had an intellectually honest, say, we believe different things here and that's okay...
She gets very passionate, and I think, you know, sometimes she misses the mark on certain things, but she's a very good person, and I think she's ultimately, she has all the right intentions.
It's like with a guy like Cenk, though, I think he's his own worst enemy in that regard because once you start doing that, then you have to sort of double down just to try to figure out a more eloquent way of reestablishing your position.
And when you do that, people don't take you seriously anymore.
It is about you in a way because you're a part of this big stuff and also when you're doing your show like the Rubin Report, what you're doing is you're expressing yourself and you become a credible portal to these ideas and information.
So it is about you in a way because it's about all of us and it's about your credibility as that portal.
And you have to defend that.
Look, I'm wrong about shit all the time.
But if I'm wrong about shit, dude, I'm the first person to tell you I'm wrong about it.
Because I'm horrified.
Unless it's like some simple stupid mistake.
But if I make a mistake, I want to be the first guy to talk about it.
I don't want anybody believing anything that's not true to help my ego.
There's too many different, you know, there's some different weird Filipinos, there's Silat, there's different stick-fighting styles, and like, you can't know everything.
Well, not only you can't know anything, but if you want to see how the thing that you consider yourself an expert in, how it all sort of leads to one road, look, what you did with Mencia, Because you had a set of principles, right?
You had a set of principles in something that you love, stand-up, right?
I mean, is there anything you love more than stand-up besides wife and kids?
The real problem with that Mencia thing was that the art form was being compromised, not just by him stealing from other people, but him creating an environment where people were terrified to express themselves.
You couldn't express yourself because he would steal those ideas and call them his own.
There was literally a signal that people would do where you'd be on stage for five minutes, you had a 15-minute set, and all of a sudden, five minutes in, the light would be on.
It was also the people that were running the comedy store were fucking retarded, as well as the people that were running these agencies were fucking retarded.
The conversation that I had with my agents when they were telling me that I had to either apologize to Mencia or that they were going to drop me, I go, do you guys understand what you're doing?
Because you're making a decision right now.
You're calling it business.
You're making a decision that's going to affect the rest of your life.
You're supporting a criminal and all you sell is art.
All you sell is art.
That's all you guys do You don't you don't produce widgets you guys aren't building cars.
You guys are set you you're sellers Yeah of other people's art That's what an agent is and what you have here is a guy who's stealing art and selling it You have a vampire and you're taking this vampire He will suck the blood off the creative geniuses that you have on your roster, but But meanwhile, the opposite happened.
Louis C.K. left them immediately.
Dave Attell left them.
Nick Swartzen left them.
People that found out about him went, fuck this.
Then he left them.
So the whole thing was a disaster for Gersh, you know, for the agency at the time.
I mean, they lost a fuckload of money because of that one conversation that we had over the phone, where I would have stayed with them.
I'm like, if you want to defend this douchebag, you know, I don't give a fuck.
He's been my agent for years.
You know, I like the guy.
I'm not even going to name him.
He's a good dude.
But he was being put into position by the guy who owned the company, that like, look, this guy is calling me up saying he demands that Joe apologize to him, and he wants it to be a big deal, and I'm like, fuck you.
Well, a lot of them contacted me while that was going on, and some of them didn't want to be named, and some of them didn't mind if I named them, but I think, honestly, that most likely he stole almost everything he did.
And that he stole it from different sources and changed it around.
But you've got that with a lot of comics.
You've got that with a lot of really shitty comedians make it.
And one of the ways they make it is they take other people's ideas and they move them around just enough.
Has more talent or had more talent in his finger than I probably have in my whole body and that was well known yes you know I know I know a comic personally you probably know him too but I won't name him for the purpose of this but who Robin stole a bit from didn't and then he never told him but then just sent him a check I think he sent him a $15,000 check he did that to a lot of guys yeah well Robin was much better as a performer than he was as a creative guy yeah as someone who came up with the ideas Have you ever heard the phrase parallel evolution?
I had a comic when I was working in New York that I worked with almost every night, and he started lifting from people, and we all kind of knew it, and he did exactly what you said.
It was like he would take the premise, but then just tweak it enough that every time I'd be watching, I'd go...
But we all knew.
And one night I finally confronted him.
He's still doing stand-up, by the way, and we've since become friends and he's sort of apologized and whatever.
And he said to me one night, he goes, Dave, Dave, don't you know about parallel evolution?
The premise being that these jokes just evolve over, you know, if you're talking about sort of current event type things, we're all going to, a certain amount of it's just going to evolve at the same time.
And I said, I was about to say his name, but I said, I said, not only are you lifting jokes, you also made up a theory about If you could apply that sort of creative thinking to your jokes, maybe we wouldn't be in this problem.
Whether it's stand-up or whether it's radio or on-air, what you have, the thing that at the end of the day they come to you is something that you can't really quantify.
People understand a certain series of things about you that they like, so if the average person says, why do you like Rogan?
They could lay out a couple things, but there's that other thing that just is there.
They can't duplicate you, but in the case of a guy like Robin Williams, he can duplicate all the things that you do that people like.
And that becomes a problem because if he goes on before you, and that was one of the Mencia things that he would do, he would steal someone's bit and then bring them on.
Because at Comedy Store you tag team, which means you would go on and you would say, thank you very much, goodnight, alright, this next comic is, you know, and you'd bring up your friend.
Right, so no MC. Yeah, no MC at the Comedy Store.
And he would bring on guys right after he did their closing bit And he would do it to fuck with them.
And he would do it because he had some power.
And because the Mexican community is desperately looking for star comedians.
I mean, they have a few of them.
Like, George Lopez was always a big one.
And Gabriel Iglesias is a big one.
He sells out everywhere.
But he's a really nice guy.
And the difference being that Mencia is not really Mexican.
He was completely concocted.
And that's what really did him in more than anything.
I was at a party a couple weeks ago and Dice was there.
And I was never a huge, huge fan of his.
But I do remember...
Around whatever that was, maybe 89, 90, maybe a little later when he sold out the garden and when he was in that year of just sanity.
I remember watching that and thinking like, this is incredible.
Like it was one of the things that really sparked me with stand-up because even though I didn't love the material and I understood how stupid the jokes were sort of, but I was like, the power of this is fucking amazing.
And so I went up to him at this party and I tapped him on the shoulder and I just said, Dave, comic, blah, blah.
And it's a hilarious movie because, you know, ultimately this guy, you know, becomes this guy that the ladies love and then the potion starts wearing off and he goes back to being his nerdy self again.
Dice is that guy.
I mean, that's who he is on stage.
Well, it was only a part of his act, and then it became the best part of his act, and then it became his act.
And think about the fact that if you watch that Madison Square Garden special, which it's all on YouTube, you can watch it, people are announcing the jokes before he even finishes the premise.
That was the power.
That's where it showed to me the power of stand-up.
I remember what got me into stand-up was I was four years old, I was six maybe, 1983, I saw Bill Cosby himself on HBO. And I was on the floor, even though I probably didn't even really understand what he was talking about, I thought this was the greatest thing ever.
You know you're grown up, by the way, when your childhood hero becomes a serial rapist.
And I know that even talking about Cosby, it's like hard to do at this point because everyone associates such terrible stuff.
But I did see him live a couple of times.
And one of the most amazing things that I ever saw a comic do ever was that, you know, everyone knew that whole himself special.
Every comic loved it pretty much.
So many from Chris Rock to Seinfeld to a zillion people credit that with like being one of their seminal things and the records and all that.
And I saw Cosby maybe 10 years ago in Jersey.
And he was doing all new stuff.
And, you know, it was kind of, you know, by his last 10 years, haven't been that kind to him.
And even just the way he looks and he's had some health things like just what none of it was that great.
But then at the end, he goes, I'm going to do one old bit for you.
And he said, I know you all know it.
I know you all know it, but I'm going to do one little bit for you.
And he did the dentist routine.
And everyone knew it, but he was such a master that it was like watching someone with clay.
Because he could take the laughs before they were coming and then just change it enough to keep them going more.
And they weren't yelling out the punchlines because it wasn't as, you know, like...
It's didactic or just set as dice, but it was amazing to watch, to do comedy and invent your old bit that you've now reinvented a thousand times and they know it all, and it was as good as ever.
Well, his old stuff, I mean, in the time, and that is a thing that you need to take into consideration when you watch stand-up, is that stand-up is sort of...
It's sort of a time machine.
It's a time capsule.
And, like, that's why you can go back and listen to Lenny Bruce, who is arguably the most important stand-up comic ever, and he's not very funny.
It's just not.
It's not very good today.
And this is coming from someone who has Lenny Bruce posters framed in his house, and I have Lenny Bruce live at the Fillmore in my office.
I mean, he's, in my opinion, the most important guy ever.
So I had Kelly Carlin on this week, who's George's daughter, who's a good friend of mine.
And we talked about that and we related it all to everything else we've been talking about here, the social justice stuff and language and words and being afraid to hear certain ideas and all that.
So it was a really, really interesting conversation.
And I watched a bunch of George's stuff just in preparation.
I've seen it all a thousand times.
But I thought actually a lot of it still does stand.
Some of it, yeah, the seven dirty words sort of seem ridiculous now in a certain way.
He had like a five-year, I think, sort of lull, I guess, maybe in the mid-90s or something, where I thought it became just too much about cursing and whatever.
Which is really weird when you consider all the allegations that have surfaced since with him and transgender people and transsexuals and picking up hookers that were men.
But, you know, it's funny that we try, as a society, like, so many of the people that, of course, that we admire, but that everyone admire, are comedians, because we're supposed to tell the truth.
We are supposed to tell the truth.
And then at the same time, comedians are often either the sad clown or severely emotionally crippled or wanting that approval thing before and all the lines that you were talking about.
And it's a really bizarre place.
So then when you suddenly get all that approval...
And then it's like, can you still also grow as a human while you're getting approval from something that came out of some dysfunction?
Come to think of it, I think he died later that day.
But he said something that I thought was really great.
He said, you know, he said, when I became a good comic was when I got over the need of Yeah.
And I think that it's a good lesson for humans in general, just for people.
Getting over whatever the need is of yourself, and we all struggle with this.
Of course, I struggle with it as a person and as a comic and a host or whatever it is.
We all have that shit and wanting all that approval, but when you can get over that and really do things for the right, clean reasons and at the same time live in a way that honors all those things that you stand up for, I think that's the secret.
That's the sauce.
That's what we should all be trying to do.
And it transcends.
It transcends comedy and it transcends everything, pretty much.
And I think also that process of the need, that's the fuel that gets you off the earth and away from the effects of gravity.
And then the momentum of that sort of carries you on, but you don't necessarily have to keep that fucking jet engine fire under your asshole all the time.
We've only known each other for whatever it is, two hours now.
I did stand up for about 10 years in the closet.
Now, I was mostly doing political stuff and social stuff.
I wasn't like outwardly lying all the time and being like...
Fuck this chick and that.
It wasn't like that.
But I constantly was avoiding the truth on stage.
Or if I was getting heckled, there were easy ways that it would imply that I was straight.
And I'm 100% sure there were times that I made it seem like I was straight or something like that.
But that angst and that fuel really made me successful really quick.
I was passed at the Comedy Cellar a year into doing stand-up.
And then a couple years later, it basically all crumbled on me because I realized that my life, my person life, was way behind where my art was.
And then I ended up doing gay shows, which is another fucking nightmare because if you're a gay comic, they have one at every club, right?
There's sort of one stereotypical gay comic.
And then suddenly I was the gay comic and I don't...
Act that gay, whatever the hell that means, so I wasn't even gay enough for them.
Then I ended up on a gay TV channel on Here TV, which was this, like, premium gay channel.
And then I ended up on the gay channel on Sirius XM. I wanted to talk about politics, and instead I was fucking interviewing Real Housewives and, you know, all that shit.
And it had nothing, nothing to do with anything I wanted to do.
Because if you're a magician and you believe that you're really pulling a rabbit out of a fucking hat...
You're an idiot.
You're the guy with the trick.
And the trick is, your voice is amplified, you're on the stage, you've figured out the cadence and the hypnotic rhythm in order to get people to laugh at your stuff.
But what are you actually trying to do?
If you're still trying to fill holes, well, you fucking missed it, son.
That's just supposed to get you to the dance.
And once you're at the dance, then it's supposed to be about creating the art.
Then it's supposed to be about trying to figure out what is the best way to make something really funny.
What is the best way to make something so I contribute?
I contribute to culture.
I contribute to people's entertainment value.
They go out, they can say, hey, Dave Rubin is at the Ice House tonight.
Let's go on out and have a good time.
And they leave there and they go, that was fun.
Oh my God, that was great.
And that's the goal.
The goal is to, you're changing the way people feel.
And you can do that with ideas and you've got to work them through.
Yeah, what gets you to the dance in the first place is your fucked up past.
Your angst, your insecurities, all that shit.
It's a matter of the people that cling to those things and never get rid of them, then they make it and they don't know what the fuck to do.
We were both on that Sunset Gower lot that I was talking about, and we were next door to each other, so I'd hang out with him.
We're just fellow comics, and that's the bond that we shared.
but he had a lot more responsibility than me because I was on this giant ensemble where I was the fifth or sixth person when the credits roll.
It'd be like, "Phil Hartman or Dave Foley, Moritana." So I had no pressure, but he had the Greg Giraldo show.
I don't remember what it was called, but it was his show.
And he went from that, and then he was really a big part of Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn And there's that great moment where he shut down Dennis Leary on Tough Crowd.
It was like one of my all-time favorite moments on Tough Crowd because, you know, Dennis was getting upset that Greg Giraldo had written jokes.
But I was like, I'll tell him I get headaches, my knees hurt after I play basketball, back pain.
I mean, the woman looked at me like, shut the fuck up.
You know?
And then I went into, I had never been to one of the stores, one of the dispensaries, went in there for, I still can't believe, I've only been there a couple times now, but I can't believe, like, just the level of, it's a real salesperson, you know, and candy and edibles and oil.
Because with the UFC, look, I have a bio when I do the UFC, which will tell me a fighter's record, tell me who they're training with, but when the matches are going on, I'm not leafing through papers.
If I start talking about a fight that happened seven years ago in another organization, it's because it's in my head.
You know, and when I talk to people, they're like, what kind of preparation do you do?
I'm like, I'm not doing any preparation.
The preparation, well, I am, but I'm not.
The preparation that I'm doing, I would do anyway.
I want to watch their fights because I know they're coming up.
So I'll watch their shit if I need to know about some of their training methods.
But those are things that I will do because I'm curious about, I want to broaden my understanding of what their preparation is.
Because I want to enjoy the fight more, and I'll enjoy the fight more if I do that, and then I express that.
And not only do you immediately do it, you can immediately scroll and see, and approval, approval, approval, they love me, they love me, they hate me, they love me, whatever it is.
And all of that, and it goes to what we started with this whole thing about, and six second videos, and all of this shit, and this bounce back of why people like this now, is because all of this I really think is, they've done studies where it's actually rewiring synapses and all of this stuff.
It's changing people's brains.
The internet is actually having a physical effect on us.
I feel that I feel even when I'm holding my iPad I feel like I've done something to my pinky like my pinky has like a little I'm not kidding like I've got like two little indentations here because I'm holding this thing all the time like this You know I mean really people you do all kinds of weird you know if you're writing I'm a lefty so like If I'm writing like I have a little indentation on my index finger because the pen is always lying there like you actually can physically change your body by some of this Unquestionably.
Remember the chick who, she doesn't sleep on beds and she's got this interesting Kathy.
Is her name Kathy?
Whatever.
Jamie will find it.
But anyway, the way she described it is she was saying that when you're staring, Kathy Bowman?
Yeah, Katie Bowman.
Thank you.
Katie Bowman.
She said when you're staring at one distance all the time, like the distance between your face and your laptop or your face and your phone, is that your eyes are supposed to look at close things and far things and look at this broad range of distances.
And instead, you're only looking at something right in front of your face, and it fucks with literally the shape of your eye.
Yeah, so, I mean, really think about that, how we've changed in 100 years, and as you were talking about earlier, about how the internet's going to change us, and we're learning so much more faster and all that, that now it's so involved in this digital...
I mean, it's the matrix is becoming real.
Like, ultimately, we're just the batteries for these things to keep going.
You know, like, we're just putting information.
We're putting whatever our spirit is, whatever you want to call that, is just the battery for this digital thing to exist.
He's a fascinating thinker and author from, like, the 50s and 60s, I think it was.
And he was a part of...
He was a part of the counterculture in a lot of ways.
A lot of people quote him.
But one of the things that he said about this is technology before computers.
He said human beings are the sex organs for the machine world.
The idea that we exist to create these machines.
And I firmly believe that what we're doing is we are some sort of a technological caterpillar.
And we're giving birth to a new life form.
I really, really believe that.
And I think that Elon Musk and what he said about summoning the demon in the form of artificial intelligence, I don't think that's off at all.
I think there's gonna come a time, whether it's a hundred years or a thousand years, Human life and the biological limitations of our own cellular bodies, it's going to be ridiculous.
We're going to find something that has some of the basic building blocks of life, like Earth.
Look, Carl Sagan, our sun is not spectacular by any stretch.
And we know that there's billions and billions of suns in this galaxy, in this universe, that whole thing.
And it endlessly extrapolates.
And all we are are just a tiny rock that had the right...
Distance from the sun and the right amount of chemicals to make all this shit happen.
We're going to find something that's going to be similar to this, but maybe it'll all be 10 degrees hotter.
And because of that, everything will have evolved slightly differently.
Or maybe, you know, you could pick like I Love Star Wars, you could pick any of those planets, you know, like it just evolved differently.
There'll be a planet that's, you know, mostly water and we'll have to eventually learn how to deal with that unless the guys get here first and kill us.
That is possible, but I think that our own biological limitations, our own organisms, are so acutely adapted to this environment, to the environment of planet Earth, that it would be insanely difficult for us to colonize another planet.
Insanely problematic when it comes to dealing with whatever life is already there, dealing with the environment.
We have a shitty old car, and we're like, let's just abandon it and leave it on the lawn and move to the neighbor's house.
I mean, that's really the idea, but the neighbor's house is on fire all the time, and it gets pelted with asteroids.
I think we're going to put all of our effort into flying to some other planet, and on the way there, their sun's going to supernova, and then we're going to blow up in the middle of space, and all hope will be lost.
I really think something about humans, something about...
Look, right now, even if we cut...
And again, I'm not a scientist, but even if we cut our greenhouse gases here in America and we do all this stuff, India, these developing nations, China, they're going through what we went through 60 years ago.
So when we have the UN meet and try to get everybody to come up with numbers that we're going to allow to put out this much smog and this much all this bullshit...
It's like, what right do we have to tell them not to do everything they can to advance just the way we did 50 years ago?
So it's funny, and I live in West Hollywood.
There are no plastic bags, right?
And they don't even want to give me a paper bag at Trader Joe's anymore, you know?
You know, that's almost 100 years exactly from when I was born.
I was born in 67. So 102 years later, I was born after slavery.
That's nothing.
100 years is not that much time.
I think that a thousand years from now, who the fuck knows what kind of technological capabilities we're going to have as far as our ability to not just not create waste, but to use up all the waste that we have created and use it in a positive way.
Just because you burn gasoline, it creates pollution.
It doesn't mean that's the only way you can get energy.
And just because pollution is in the air, carbon dioxide is hitting record levels, it doesn't mean that can't be maintained or regulated.
I think there's got to be a way that people can figure out how to live sustainably.
If it's possible to live sustainably in a small community, it's possible to live sustainably globally.
So when you do it for yourself, like when you hunt for your meat, and you were telling me you have chickens before, when you do all that stuff, do you feel that you're doing it For yourself?
But my intent going in is like, I don't want to rely on other people for my food.
I don't want to rely on some farmer to not shove antibiotics and hormones into food.
I want to be able to eat clean, healthy food.
Also, ethically, I don't want to be a part of the factory farming system.
When I watch these YouTube videos, these PETA videos on how they raise pigs and cows, it's fucking evil.
I'd rather shoot a wild pig.
I'd rather eat moose.
I think it's better for you, too.
Protein-wise, the protein content of elk and moose is far higher than the protein content of beef.
It's better for you.
You can eat smaller portions.
You get more out of it.
For me, it gives me a better feeling.
I know where everything came from.
When I eat a steak that I cut from an elk myself, that is such a different feeling than when you go to the supermarket and you get something of ambiguous origins and plastic wrapped container and you just take it home.
You cut open the plastic and slap it on the grill and I'm out here grilling like a man.
On other ones, if I'm traveling, I'm flying, what I can do is do a lot of it and then bring the remaining pieces, I'll quarter it, and bring the quarters to a meat processor and ask them to turn into steaks or turn into sausage or have things like that done.
But the big cuts, like the back straps and the tenderloins and stuff like that, I do all that myself.
The heart and the liver, I cut all that stuff out myself and then I bring it with me.
I freeze it and You know, if you want to see how crazy the food system is, also you could check, you know, there's so many documentaries on this, but the amount of laws that we have that protect the factory farming from simple things like having cameras in where the chickens are.
Illegal.
The things that Purdue is getting away with.
I always think Purdue to me is like...
The worst of the worst.
Because if you watch their commercials, and this goes to what we're talking about with the drugs and the happy people during the day, and then they're having diarrhea and killing each other, whatever.
Like the Purdue commercials, you got this guy come out, he's hanging out with chickens.
You know, he's talking to them, oh, there's Bernadette.
Between feeding these animals all sorts of shit that they shouldn't be eating.
Have you ever drove up, I think it's a five, if you're driving up towards San Francisco, you pass Harris Ranch?
So Harris Ranch, I think, if I'm not mistaken, it's the largest meat producer in the United States, or the largest meat producing ranch in the United States.
And when you pass it, they call it Kauschwitz.
I mean, that's how there's so much...
It stinks of death.
I mean, pure death, right?
You smell that for a good mile or two.
You can see it in the air.
You see these dirty animals that can barely move.
I mean, I love meat.
On my Twitter from last night, I had grass-fed steaks cooked on a Himalayan salt plate.
I love meat, right?
But after that...
I was like, Jesus, like, this is serious.
That's when I got on at least doing the grass-fed, free-range thing.
Like, when you have a community of 20 million people, like Los Angeles, and none of them are growing their own food, they're going to need food.
And where's that food going to come from?
It's going to come from somebody else that grows that food.
And, well, how are they going to grow that food?
They're going to grow that food in the most cost-effective and efficient way possible, which means stuff these fucking animals into these cages unless you demand something different.
And, well, if you do demand something different, you're going to have a higher price because then these companies aren't going to be making much money.
So they're going to have to charge more money for the meat, and then people can afford it, and then it becomes a problem.
But if you want to be able to go to In-N-Out Burger, or In-N-Out is not a good example because it takes a little time, but like Jack in the Box.
Pull in, get a ground-up beef sandwich within 30 seconds.
How do you think we get people to wake up on this?
We cover it on my show sometimes.
It's one of the things that I bring on Cara to talk about our food sources and the way that these, you know, we're eating sick animals and then we wonder why we're sick.
It's like, the level of our discourse in America and the level of the nonsense on cable news and they can keep us distracted With Kim Davis issues and they keep us distracted just with all of this nonsense.
And I don't think it's necessarily like some big conspiracy of keeping us distracted as much as it's what we are as humans.
There's this endless distraction.
There's just this endless distraction and you got to pilfer some truth out of it.
You got to pilfer some way to find something that works for you.
So I don't know that they can ever fix it because we're just in it.
Massive population to the point where they're trying to limit the amount of babies that people have.
We live in a very, very strange time in that people are awakening to all the problems that have been created by this massive amount of people and this incredible need for resources.
But at the same time, you're working eight hours a day plus, plus commuting, plus hobbies, plus sexual needs and entertainment needs and friendships and every pull and push and, oh, well, you've got to have civic responsibility.
Guess what, Dave Rubin?
We need you for jury duty.
You can't catch up.
You can't catch up.
And we operate on this fucking constant momentum with very little quiet time.
You can get a cheap one for like, well, I think there's a company called Zen Float that makes a small personal one that Duncan has in his house, and I think that one is still fairly expensive, but it's like $1,500.
I got the top-of-the-line bad mama-jama float lab version, which is like $30,000.
I was reading this thing that they were talking about people, they experience more satisfaction in the ownership of things like Ikea, because even though it's not like good furniture, it's not like the best furniture, the fact that they put it together themselves gives them a sense of satisfaction.
That I think we're kind of missing in part of our culture.
Like, someone who built their own house and built their own furniture, and they sit in their own house, their own furniture, probably gets, like, a deep feeling of satisfaction about that.
I really have something and know what I'm saying and know what I'm doing and being rewarded for it financially and personally and by my audience and stuff.
But, you know, I'm joking, but also there's a lot of truth in that.
That I feel like it sort of started working, and I was just looking around my place the other day like, maybe the next phase will be a little bit more...
I don't worry about money, but I worry about work in that I want to make sure that everything I'm doing is good.
Whether it's podcasts or whether it's stand-up or whether it's doing my commentary, I always want to make sure that I'm not doing bad stuff and that if I have done something that's not that good, I make sure that that doesn't happen ever again.
Or that if it does happen again, I learn from that one too and it gets better even there.
So there's that.
It's not like, shit, I've got to pay my bills.
But I do remember that feeling.
Bad.
And I also remember the moment that that went away, how free it was.
Like, I got a development deal when I was like, I don't know how many years in the economy, but it was like 93. And I got a big check from Disney, of all people.
And all of a sudden, I didn't have to worry about how I was paying my rent.
All of a sudden, for at least the next year or so, or a couple years, it was paid.
And it was like...
This silence, like this weight, just literally a physical weight felt like it lifted off my shoulders.
And then I thought about it and I said, man, you know what?
Some people never get to that place.
They live their life from cradle to the grave, constantly under the pressure of bills, check to check.
And that freedom of not worrying about your bills is massive.
And people trip themselves up by putting themselves in debt and by getting in over their Mm-hmm.
Yeah, but I was trying to do it, and I was worried about making money at the same time.
And as soon as the worry about making money kind of goes away, then you're left with a pure sense of why you're doing it.
Listen, we're almost out of time, but really, before we leave, I have to talk to you about one thing that you told me that I think is, and when you do start doing well, then they're your buddy.
It's an incestuous, weird, fucking very strange, codependent relationship.
Listen, we're almost out of time, but I really, before we leave, I have to talk to you about one thing that you told me that I think is incredibly fascinating.
You came out literally to someone for the very first time the day before September 11th.
Of September 11th, so meaning September 10th, it just rolled into September 11th.
The first person I ever came out to, a brilliant comic who you've never heard of, and I don't even know what happened to him.
This guy, Mike Singer, was one of the best comics that I ever knew.
We worked for years together.
This guy was wickedly funny.
I think he lives in Columbia now or something, not doing stand-up.
Anyway, he was gay, and he was...
So in a way, I was ahead of my time in terms of being out as a comic that doesn't necessarily play into every stereotype and all that.
This guy was really ahead of it because he was 15 years older than me and had done it already.
Anyway, we were in the Times Square subway.
I was going back.
I lived on the Upper East at the time.
I was walking to the...
Shuttle thing to go to get on the east side.
And I was just a fucking complete mess.
It's incredibly hard to live one life, right?
Like to live one life on this planet is a hard thing.
Try living two at the same time.
And that's what I was doing because I had my life that everyone knew.
And then I had this secret life where I was out, you know, hooking up and I was lying to people constantly, even though I never intended to lie.
I would be somewhere and I'd bump into a friend and I'd be with a guy, a gay person, and I could just, oh, that's my cousin.
It was incredible.
Really, I mean this.
I never intended to lie to people or it just became this really horrible game of cat and mouse and I was depressed and I was smoking a lot of pot and all this shit.
Anyway...
And then when it really...
As I said to you earlier, it was the fuel for good comedy for a long time.
And then eventually it just started sputtering.
It was like I wasn't happy.
I wasn't full.
I couldn't bring those things to the stage anymore.
And just my life was a fucking disaster.
Anyway, about midnight, just eight hours before the first plane hit, I'm in this Times Square subway station with my friend.
I told him I was gay.
I don't think he realized...
Even though this guy knew me for years, I don't think he realized that...
I don't think I said, oh, you're the first person I'm telling or something like that.
I just said it.
And we talked for two or three minutes, and he's like, all right, I'll talk to you later this week or something.
And I go home, and I woke up, and I turn on the TV, and America's under attack.
And I kid you not, I was smoking a lot of pot at the time.
I was not mentally right.
I wasn't.
I remember probably a few weeks before that, I was walking to the subway, and And by living two lives, I felt like a crazy person.
It's hard to describe.
The only way I could describe it was, I remember walking down 2nd Avenue, and it looked like all the buildings were shaking.
Like, I felt centered.
Like, I was okay, but literally it felt like the world was being ripped apart.
That was like the level of disconnect I had with reality at that point.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like, if you can't express your love properly, if you can't, you know, that's why we started this whole thing talking about all these guys that are jacked and working out all the time and whatever.
It's like, that's why I said it's very sad to me because these are people who could not express a very human thing in a proper way.
So they end up acting out at 45 in a way that they should have acted when they were 15, you know?
Well, Milo, who you had on a couple weeks ago, and I had him on the day or two after, I mean, we argued about that.
Me as the liberal, the gay married liberal, who's for that traditional thing, and him as the off-the-wall British gay conservative who's against gay marriage because he wants to talk about drugs and partying and sex and whatever.
Even saying that now, I've only told this publicly maybe twice, it sounds completely fucking insane.
And it is insane.
But that's where my head was at.
And interestingly, after that...
The way I dealt with coming out was I would tell someone and then I would get this little burst of feeling better.
I would suddenly, because I was constricting my heart, and when I would tell someone, it would open up a little and I'd feel better and I really could feel like I could breathe better, really felt better.
And then I would wait until that pressure would start building again.
Sometimes I would wait months and then I would tell someone.
And then I would do this over the course of two years.
And then eventually I realized, I was like, every time I tell somebody It's a weird secret because the people that do care, that don't like it, they're not worth knowing.
And nobody, literally nobody.
Nobody that I told, you know, my dad struggled for a little bit or, you know, whatever, this and that.
The thing that mostly people got was that nobody believed I was gay.
That was like my main, but you play basketball.
You know what I mean?
You play basketball.
Like, you know, like that.
So nobody could believe, like, they just, well, you don't seem gay.
So a lot of times people will say to me, you know, you act straight or you're straight acting or something, which in the gay community is thought of as like this great thing, you know, that if you're straight acting, you're masculine, it's really great.
But I don't...
I don't take it that way because every time someone says it to me, it makes me feel like a freak.
You know what I mean?
Really?
Yeah, because I am who I am.
This is it.
You know what I mean?
I had gay sex last night after I had that grass-fed beef.
I'm really, like, you know, dragging out this phase thing.
But...
I realized that if I felt better when I told people, that there had to be some value in that, in a way that I couldn't understand things.
But to the straight acting, it means nothing to me.
When I meet guys that are completely flaming, or if I meet guys that you'd have no idea, I like people based on their values and their sense of humor and shit like that.
That's sort of a great way to bring this all around, because...
That gets away from judging people on what you're supposed to think about them and all that social justice warrior and regressive bullshit versus judging people on the content of their character.
And also, it gets back to what we were saying earlier, that it's just being aware socially, being a good person to communicate with versus being socially retarded and just looking for those Ben Affleck brownie moments.
Let me toss in one other thing that sort of ties into this really nicely.
So one time when I was on The Young Turks, I'm not going to mention names here, but I was on and they were showing a clip from Fox News and they were talking about how the black host, that he was such a token black guy.
He was such a token black guy.
And I actually know the guy.
It's this guy, David Webb, who I used to work with at SiriusXM.
I'm pretty good friends with him.
I had dinner with him last week.
He is a black conservative.
He is a conservative.
I know him.
I know what this guy believes.
He spends hours on the air every day professing his beliefs.
And that was another...
This happened a little bit after that whole Sam Harris thing.
But that was another moment when I realized how perverse...
This whole regressive thing is that here you have people on the left that are supposed to be about ideas, looking at the color of that guy's skin and saying, well, because you don't believe what I think you're supposed to believe as a black person.
You're a token black guy.
You know, we've all done that.
You know, like, when they show, like, a Republican convention and there's one black guy applauding, you know, like, oh, there's the token black guy.
But I realized that's actually racism.
Like, that was really a seminal moment for me that really changed my thinking.
Because I was like, this is crazy.
I know this person personally.
This is a friend of mine, and I know he believes.
He's not doing this because he's a token black guy.
This is what he believes.
And you as the on the left are pointing at this guy and saying you're different than what I think you're supposed to be, black guy.
So you must be a token or you're an Uncle Tom or a sellout or something.
And also all of this, when you have the gay stuff, the social justice or the regressive stuff, like judge people based on what they say, what they say and what they believe.