All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
April 12, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:33:07
20220412_free-speech-suppression-woke-cultural-drift-and-be
|

Time Text
Bloodshot Eyes After LASIC 00:03:44
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
I am so glad today to be back with you.
I don't have my glasses on.
I still have very, very, very bloodshot eyes from my LASIC, which was just a couple of days ago.
My eyes feel kind of strange.
But anyway, if they start to bother me with the lights and all that, I've got my glasses.
They say in like two weeks, I'm going to be 100%.
Anyway, I'm also thrilled to welcome back my good friend Dave Rubin, who I am going to help launch his book a little bit later this month.
More on that later.
Dave's a man of many talents, as you know.
He has a hugely popular podcast and YouTube channel.
He's an entrepreneur with his locals platform, Thriving.
He's a husband, and as he announced last month, he's about to be a dad times two.
He's also a best-selling author, and his new book is called Don't Burn This Country.
Follows up on Don't Burn This Book.
Don't Burn This Country.
The subheading is Surviving and Thriving in Our Woke Dystopia.
And it's out today.
FIKEN er et superenkelt regnskapsprogram for bedrifter.
Men visste du at du også kan starte din egen bedrift med FIKEN?
Gjør som tusenvis av andre og registrerer AS og enkelpersonforetak trygt og enkelt ved å fylle et skjema på FIKEN.no.
Vi hjelper deg hele veien til ferdig registrert bedrift.
Du trenger ikke være kunde av FIKEN fra før og velger helt selv om du vil bruke regnskapsprogrammet vårt etterpå.
Tjenesten koster heller ingenting ekstra.
FIKEN.
Start din egen bedrift.
Superenkelt.
Dave, velkommen tilbake.
Megan, it's good to see you.
How are your eyes?
I missed this news that you went under elective surgery to correct your vision.
Are you?
Do you want to do this with you know, you could put on those crazy shades that the elderly glaucoma?
I have been wearing these for the past few days right here, Dave Rubin.
And actually, they're pretty, they're pretty comfortable.
I have to say, like, the bright lights are a little bit much post-LASIC.
I don't know if you have increased light sensitivity for a couple of days.
But my eyes are kind of itchy with the makeup on.
I don't know.
We'll see what I do.
But yeah, I decided to take it off, take it all off for you, Dave Rubin.
And here I am, make it out.
Megan, you'll appreciate this.
Guys, could one of you grab my newsman glasses for me?
One of the little gimmicks that we do on my show, because I bring the news to people, but I don't consider myself a journalist in any way.
I just kind of tell people what I think about the world.
But I'm always watching these cable news pro well, I don't have cable anymore, but I see these clips of these people, the cable news people.
You used to be a cable news person.
And remember when they're doing something serious, they always do this.
They put on their fake glasses.
Yes.
And then they read something.
You know, Don Lemon, he's always reading something with fake glasses and then he takes it off to not.
They're all trying to be Walter Cronkite Cronkite when it was real, you know, 40 years ago.
So I have these are unrelated to vision.
They're completely fake, but I have them just in case.
Here's what we used to do in the law.
So I used to wear, you know, first I wore glasses, then I wore contacts, and I got LASIC.
So the picture of these is not sunglasses, but it's like regular glasses.
So you're talking to the jury.
You're like, members of the jury, I am telling you the defendant did not commit this crime.
Members of the jury, what I have to say to you is so important.
He did not commit this crime.
You take off the glasses for effect.
And then I switched over to contacts.
And what I realized is it's so much less effective to go over to the trier effect and be like, if you could just stand by one second.
Fake Glasses and Cable News 00:16:00
I've got a really important point to make.
Try to pull out.
There's something very powerful about people.
My God, he can't see.
He must read a lot.
Thus, he's smart.
I have these glasses.
Anyway, Megan, it's always great to see you.
I'm very happy to be spending book launch day with you.
I'm so excited for you.
Congrats on the launch.
And look at like, I'm just looking at the back of the book and the people.
Listen to the people who have blurbed this book.
Jordan Peterson, hello.
Dennis Prager, Larry Elder.
I know all those three are mentors to you.
Yours truly, a friend, Ben Shapiro, Glenn Beck, Ayan Hirsi Ali.
I mean, this is like a who's who cast of people I admire too.
So I love this.
And a lot of these people are helping you launch the book and interviewing you in various cities.
And we'll be going up to not far from where my nan used to live in West Nyack, New York.
She lived in Tappanzee, Tapan, until she died at 101.
So I love that area of the country and I love the people's accents.
They remind me of Nana.
And we'll have a ton of fun.
But there's much to go over.
And the book is very, very timely.
One thing I wanted to ask you about before we kick it off is in the acknowledgements, you thanked your publishing company and suggested like not that it was a hard sell, but that it was a risk, you know, to publish this.
Is that just because it's because it's anti-woke?
Or was there like a specific push on this?
Because obviously you'd have to backdate the pitch by at least a year.
Yeah, there were a couple of things going on.
You know, my first book, Don't Burn This Book, came out in April of 2020.
So it was literally two years ago this week.
And obviously that was right at the beginning of COVID, lockdowns, et cetera, et cetera.
We had canceled.
I had a worldwide tour.
I was going to go all over Europe and Canada and Australia and a whole bunch of stuff.
We canceled all that.
You know, the book, I couldn't do any signings.
I couldn't do any events here.
You know, the book was supposed to be at Costco and Barnes and Nobles and everyone else.
Everything was closed.
The airports were closed.
And then the book still managed to do pretty well, which I'm very proud of because it was a really, really weird time.
So when I wrote that in the acknowledgements, it was sort of twofold.
It was one, well, you know, this is the woke thing first.
Let's do that one first.
That to write anything that's non-woke these days, there's a risk because we know what happens at the publishing houses, that often the inmates are running the asylum and these junior editors or relatively low-level employees, they seem to get veto power over what books can be published and what ideas can be talked about.
Now, since I'm writing a very anti-woke book, to say the least, I knew there was a risk there.
But I also knew there was a risk in that when I signed on for this book, which was basically right after the first book, because it did do well, we didn't know what the world was going to look like.
Like, who knew what the political situation was going to look like?
Who knew what sales were going to look like?
Who knew if we were ever going to get out of the pandemic or a whole bunch of other stuff?
So I'm very appreciative of Penguin for sticking with me throughout this.
And because it was a risk.
It was a risk in that, hey, all right, the first book did okay, but it was a weird time.
But who knows?
Because as you just said, the publishing process is really slow.
You write a book, it doesn't hit the shelves till about a year later.
Who knows what the world's going to be like?
So yeah, I'm glad it's out.
And I think just publishing a white male author in today's day and age takes guts.
Just having a white male author on the roster of those one publishers, good for them.
It takes courage.
Megan, I did not know you were a biologist, but it is true I am a male.
You know what?
I'm actually, I know of what I speak because, well, not just the male thing, but literally today in the headlines, Durham University, as part of its decolonization efforts, they are calling on math professors to ask themselves, math, I say, if they are citing work from mostly white or male mathematicians.
And if so, to rethink that, because math now can only be taught if it somehow originated.
You got to go back and figure out, like, what color was Pythagoras?
I mean, I don't think he wasn't that much.
Okay.
He was definitely Greek.
Well, look, all of this, it's so profoundly stupid.
And it's actually exactly why I wrote this book, because we must stop playing with these bad ideas.
Look, you have to give the devil his due.
These people, the woke people that inject all of these ridiculous ideas that we should care about the skin color of mathematicians or whether they think two plus two is five or seven or that non-racism is racism and boys or girls, all the stuff that you always talk about so well on your show.
You have to give them their credit.
They have not stopped.
They have marched through our institutions.
They have destroyed our ways of communication.
They own big tech.
Like they have done incredible, incredible damage.
And we have to sit there and really acknowledge that.
It doesn't mean you have to like what they've done, but you have to acknowledge that they've done it.
But if you, at the end of the day, are want to be in math or you want to be an engineer or someone involving one of the STEM subjects.
You know, a lot of people say six years ago when a lot of us were talking about this for the first time, I saw a lot of my friends, bright people say, oh, you know, this is just going to rampage through the humanities and the liberal arts and that sort of thing, but it'll never infect sciences.
It won't infect math.
And I think we've seen even those departments completely collapse under this.
And I think in essence, we need to build new systems of literally everything, literally everything, whether it's new entertainment avenues, get away from Disney and find new places of entertainment to new educational institutions.
I mean, why would you send your kid to a college to learn math where the professor would be talking about race?
If you do that, you are a crazy person.
Yeah, exactly.
And where you know, I mean, especially you're about to have two children.
We'll get to that in a little bit, but I presume they're going to be white children.
And I have three white children.
And I don't want my two white sons walking into a classroom where it's a problem if they're learning from books that were authored by white men.
I mean, if they're being taught essentially that that's a problem, because here's the problem at Durham University and other places.
It's not just that there are white men on the syllabus, right?
It's like, it's that, or it's not that they dominate the syllabus.
It's that they're on there at all.
More and more, they want the complete elimination of white men because just the existence of the white male author or the white male teacher or the white male historian on any of these texts or syllabi, that's a problem.
That's like it's, they deem it like some sort of an over correction.
It's racist.
It's sexist.
And it's, what is it teaching the white men sitting in that class?
Well, it's teaching them exactly what they want to teach them, which is actually they should feel guilty for things that had absolutely nothing to do with them.
And, you know, even if you were four generations or six generations off the descendants of slave owners, you still are not guilty for their sins.
You're guilty for your own actions.
That's it.
You are not guilty for your parents' sins or anyone else's.
The idea that the non-racists are constantly the ones talking about racism, there really is no one.
I mean, people say this to me all the time, Dave, you seem more conservative now or you hang out with these scary Republicans or something like that.
And it's like, aren't they racist?
People always still ask me this, but aren't they racist?
Don't they hate gays?
Something like that?
And the answer is no.
I cannot find the ones that do.
That is not to say there are not some racists.
That is not to say there are not some homophobes.
But please show me someone broadly on the right that is really trying to inject racist ideas into curriculum.
Actually, it's now the people on the right that are trying to remove those ideas.
And by the way, Megan, you are a living, breathing example of how you fight this thing because you guys had that woke nonsense at your kids' school in New York City.
You voiced your opinion about it.
And then at some point, you said enough is enough.
And you took your kids out of that school.
And I know it was not easy for you to uproot your family.
And it's not easy for anyone to do that, whether you have means or don't.
But that's the only way we will beat this thing.
We have to start removing ourselves from the systems because they're not stopping.
They've given, I mean, do you have any evidence anywhere across the board that they're stopping on any of this stuff?
No, the only thing we've won on is defund the police.
That's it.
You know, that once the, because I was talking to my executive producer about this and my, and like we were all having discussion about, does it ever reverse?
Does it ever go like left, left, left, woke, woke, woke, and then reverse?
And we were kind of struggling to find an incident where it has outside of defund the police, where people are dying.
I mean, that one kind of, it's like, and the black community in particular stood up and said, our people are dying in our communities.
Don't, in the words of Jason Riley, please stop helping us, right?
Like give us back our cops so we can live safely and we can send our kids to school and sit them in the back of cars on the way to McDonald's without having to worry about them getting shot in the head.
So these politicians, always motivated by their own backsides and saving them, saw the light on that.
But I don't know.
I don't see us, you know, coming back from the brink on the crazy transgender stuff and like all the weird sexuality that everybody's now touting as a thing.
You know, we were talking about this, the pansexual, oh, that means you have sex with like anybody.
Well, that means you're by.
You already have a letter shot.
I don't know.
I don't know.
We're not coming back.
On the policing part, you know, even though you're right that some of these places, Minnesota, New York City, some of these places that really went bananas with this stuff and then saw their cities burn as a result, and we cover the crime numbers on my show all the time, murder, every level of crime, petty larceny all the way up.
Everything is up in all of these cities.
Even the ones that have slightly reversed course on that, like New York City reversed course a little bit, crime is still way higher than it used to be.
And there still will be cascading problems with that.
Because when you demonize the police for years and years, the way that Bill de Blasio did in New York City, a place that you and I both lived and loved for much of our life, we actually lived a couple blocks away from each other in the best part of New York City, in my humble opinion, the Upper West Side.
When you do that for so long, what happens is it's not just that you can reverse it overnight, but now all the new recruits you're getting in, you're going to get a lesser quality of a recruit because they are going to feel they are going to be treated worse by the administration.
So I have a bunch of friends that are in the NYPD.
I have a bunch of good contacts over there.
Even now, although it's slightly better with Eric Adams, although I think he has been a major disappointment and he's still got kids in masks and he's doing all sorts of ridiculous stuff, there's a feeling that it still will get worse because it's not just, oh, we change policy and it's like you pull a lever and then magically everything gets better.
So I think the cities, the Democrat-run cities, even if they can slightly reverse some of this, and by the way, I think you're also right that the gender stuff is so now ingrained and cult-like, I don't see how they can possibly reverse on that, that the degradation of the system will still continue, even if you can slightly take your foot off the gas.
By the way, since we're talking about New York City crime, horrific crime took place here this morning.
They're still investigating a subway attack.
Subway attacks have been a trend, sadly, nothing like this, but there's a manhunt underway in New York right now.
Between 13 and 16 so far reported hurt, including five to seven shot in an attack around 8.30 this morning on the Manhattan bound N train coming in from Brooklyn.
They believe that the suspect set off a smoke bomb or bombs, then started shooting inside the subway.
The reports say that the gunman was wearing construction garb similar to an MTA worker.
This is soundbite, watch this, of people running out of the car.
Can we listen to it as well?
What you can see for the folks at home is people running, running out of a subway train with smoke billowing around them.
Listen.
People limping.
Now you can start to see some of the shooting victims come off.
Lots of postings on Twitter this morning with blood everywhere.
We don't know the number of dead, if any.
And what we do know is that the suspect remains at large.
And they haven't been able to catch this guy.
Dave, we're looking at already.
30% spikes in homicide nationwide right now, nationwide, 30%.
Overall crime in New York has gone up almost 60%, 59%.
This is as of 2021.
It's gone up even more this year.
Yeah, okay.
And then March 2022, felony assault up 22%.
Robbery up 56%.
Grand larceny up 79%.
Auto theft more than double.
Transit crime, that's this would qualify up 73%.
And on and on it goes.
People are afraid already of the subway.
And now we get this.
And there's just a general feeling of lawlessness in the air.
Megan, do you think it's possible if you tell an entire generation of people that the system is racist, that the entire way of life that they've come to know is fixed against them, that nothing is just in this world, that the police are against them, that the education that they've received is not true education, all of these things.
Do you think eventually, oh, and then you lock them in their houses, say for two years, you don't let them go to jobs, you keep them on computers on social media where algorithms are doing unimaginable things to them that we actually, I mean literally unimaginable, we just don't know what the algorithms are actually doing to us if you only communicate that way.
Do you think if you take all of that toxic stew, pandemic and all of that, that people might start behaving in bad ways on top of the fact that we know we have an overly medicated society already, the amount of people that are on prescription pills.
And if you turn on any cable news channel, virtually all of the commercials are about depression.
There's always a guy walking down the street with a cloud of depression following him.
And then they tell you all the side effects.
And the side effects are actually far worse than I can imagine the depression to be because it's like a list of 87 other things.
We've sort of all led ourselves here.
And that's when I sort of referenced this earlier, this idea that we're in this sort of slow descent to hell.
Every day we wake up, there's more bad news.
You know, I saw this clip actually just a few minutes before we started, the clip that you just showed there of the subway.
And again, this is a city that both of us used to live in that I love New York City, or I loved New York City.
I can't say I love it anymore.
Most of my family, at one time in my family's history, in the early 1930s to the 50s, we had probably had 100 family members living in New York City.
I think I have one distant cousin that still lives there.
Everyone has fled.
My sister and her husband and three kids were the last ones to flee during COVID.
There's a reason people do this.
If you depress people, if you tell them that the law is not the law, that you're allowed to jump turnstiles, we're not going to arrest people for petty larceny, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, it never stops there.
It keeps moving and keeps moving.
And you may remember when Rudy Giuliani took over in the early 90s, what was the first thing that he did?
He started going after the petty crimes, right?
When you would get in, I lived in Long Island.
So we would take the Midtown Tunnel in when we would go visit my grandparents who lived in Manhattan.
And right when you'd get outside the Midtown Tunnel, there were all these homeless guys and they'd have newspapers with wet soap or water, whatever it was, and they'd try to wash your windows.
One of the first things that he did was get rid of those guys.
And he did that.
It was a sign to the city.
It was assigned to the city.
Hey, we are going to clean this place up.
And then look what he did to Times Square.
Now Times Square has sort of had a bit of a reversal.
So everything that's going on has led us to a moment like this where then you see what just happened on the subway.
Creative Spaces and Petty Crimes 00:10:51
And obviously we need more info.
But when I saw it, I was just like, this doesn't surprise me.
And that's a very depressing state to be in, actually.
I just look at my note from my team.
Just recently, a child was punched in the head in Times Square.
A child punched in the head in Times Square.
We saw a man get shot in Times Square, just a tourist within the past six or seven months.
A woman in Queens was assaulted with a hammer, like personal.
We saw a man get chopped up with a with a an axe, like a hatchet inside an ATM vestibule, right?
Like these up close and personal, awful crimes, often with homeless people, often not, right?
I don't know anything about today's suspect or his, you know, the details about him.
ABC News is reporting that it was a black man.
I haven't seen anybody suggest that this is a homeless person.
He was dressed, again, like an MTA worker.
So query whether some homeless guy is going to have smoke bombs and a gun and shoot that many people and have that much methodical organization in terms of his skills.
We'll find out more.
And I'm sure they'll catch this guy.
But it is disturbing.
And I'll tell you, when we did decide to leave New York City, you know, the crazy woke school things was the reason.
But as we were weighing the options, they defunded the police by a billion dollars.
And Doug and I said, we're out.
That's it.
We're out.
And as you know, the Upper West Side is known for being a beautiful residential neighborhood under Mayor Bloomberg and Mayor Giuliani.
It really transformed into a place that like it was all families.
I mean, you could push your stroller on the sidewalk, has nice big fat sidewalks, which are great.
And you'd see just other families everywhere, you know, all backgrounds, all sorts of diversity and so on, but almost no crime.
You just didn't see crime anywhere.
And now it's a very different, sad picture, just a microcosm of what's happening elsewhere in the city and elsewhere in the country.
You know, it's one of the points you're making.
And BLM, you know, for all of its notable, it's laudable name, something you talk about in the book, its actual purpose in case after case has wound up being nefarious.
I mean, just today in the news, we talked about this last week about the $6 million house they purchased in the place you move next, right?
Out in Los Angeles or California.
And you got smart and you got out of there.
So he bought their $6.3 million house, Patrice Colors, who is one of the three founders, and she'd already spent $3.1 million in three homes for herself.
So this woman's rolling in cash.
How is that?
Maybe somebody would like to know.
Maybe it's your donation.
Maybe your donation didn't help inner city black people who are concerned about the police.
Maybe it just helped Patrice, who not only helped buy the $6.3 million house out there, but Patrice, I guess, has a lot of people in her life because I read she's got a baby and she's got a child.
She's got, there's a father to that baby, but she's also got a wife who lives in Toronto to whom she funneled another $6 million for her.
That person's nonprofit for the wife's quote nonprofit.
And that, quote, wife bought a 10,000 square foot home in Toronto dedicated as a quote trans feminist queer affirming space, Dave.
Politically aligned with suppressing black, no, with supporting black liberation.
Okay.
So anyway, finally, Black Lives Matter weighs in on this big scandal that New York Magazine broke about the house, 6.3 million, then this other 6 million house in Toronto.
And this is what they say.
I love, I love, whoever writes these press releases is a radically amusing person.
These articles are inflammatory.
Well, yes, that doesn't mean they're untrue.
And they're speculative.
Well, right, exactly.
Like you wouldn't give him the straight reason why you bought that house.
First, you tried to say it was a safe house.
Then you realized you'd shown it off in all your YouTube videos.
So that wouldn't fly.
And you decided it was more of a creative space.
And now you're calling it a creator's house acquired, quote, to provide a space for black folks to share their gifts with the world, Dave, and to hone their craft as they see fit under conditions that work best for them.
Word salad, word salad, hone crafts under conditions that work best for them and outside systems of oppression in creative industries.
So basically what they're saying is you can go there and do your arts and crafts if there's some place you don't feel safe to do your arts and crafts as a black person in 2022 America.
And for that, they wasted 6.3 million bucks of donor's dough.
I want some kind of nonprofit to buy me a $6 million house so I can do arts and crafts.
You know, I'm pretty good.
I just was at my niece's six-year-old birthday party and they're all making the slime now.
You know about the slime cream and you can make it all different colors.
It's pretty awesome.
And I would love a $6 million house, maybe on the water, something really nice on the water.
Well, we could call it slime.
We could call it a trans feminist, queer affirming space.
You know, it's funny.
When you said that, it reminded me of, did you ever see Lethal Weapon 2?
Remember Lethal Weapon with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover?
And Danny Glover in the second one, the whole running joke throughout the movie is he's kind of too old to be a cop at this point.
And he repeatedly keeps saying, I'm getting too old for this at SH.
You got the rest of the word.
And that's what I'm starting to feel.
When you said that, I was like, my gut feeling was, I'm getting too old for this.
Like we've been through this nonsense.
These people are never going to stop.
They're going to keep adding words.
They're going to keep adding pronouns.
And that's what I mean about sort of disconnecting, making choices in your own life to say, hey, I can't live in a city where my kids are going to be indoctrinated, where I won't feel safe outside and doing the things because they're not going to stop.
The powers that be, the Disney Corporation, all of the things that we see every day are feeding them, are giving them money, giving them power, giving them influence.
I don't know that we can stop that, although you could, you know, cancel your Disney Plus subscription as I did, but you can at least start building some new things for yourself because no one will pay for this, right?
So $6 million, of course, it was her house or her wife's house or her husband's house or he, she's house, whatever.
But now it's a creative space, you know, because you can't get a creative space for say 250 grand.
You need a 6 million.
That's right.
You know, I kind of like the story, I have to say, I'll be honest, because it's like all these people who are taken in.
There are some meaningful, well-intended people who donated, I'm sure, to Black Lives Matter.
But to those who are just virtue signaling, right?
Who just wanted to make themselves look out there paying insurance?
It's like, you have no insurance against anything.
This group's endorsement of you, whoever you are as a non-racist is totally meaningless.
And now you see that all you're doing is funding Patrice Culler's arts and crafts projects.
That's it.
Okay.
Enjoy that.
And this is the same way I feel about all these people who are like, it's fine for Leah Thomas to swim against the biological women.
You know, be more queer affirming, right?
Stop with your objections.
I'm like, great.
Let's do this thing.
Let's get a white male tennis player who couldn't make it on the pro circuit, who then says he's trans and enters professional women's tennis.
And let's put him up against Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams and say he's a woman and crush them and put these people, these sort of queer affirming, shaming everybody else people in the toughest position of their lives.
We know he's secretly a white man and yet he's beating all of our best women of color.
What the hell should we do?
Megan, I like where your head's at because I actually think you're right.
I know you're being slightly tongue-in-cheek, but in a way, it's like we should just accelerate their nonsense because that's where it all ends, right?
That is where it ends.
I kid you not.
I am 45 years old.
I have a torn ACL in my left knee.
I'm pretty sure that if I said I was a woman, I could make the WNBA.
They're not that great.
That's just how it is.
I still got some skills left.
Okay.
And it's like at some point, there is going to be a washed up NBA player who's 39 years old with banged up knees who had a bad back, who can't get a contract anymore.
And he's going to say, my name is not Charles anymore.
It's Shaniqua or whatever.
And he's going to be in the WNBA.
And all of the feminists are going to have to go, oh my God, look at that beautiful woman dunking over all the other chicks.
So yeah, let's just accelerate the nonsense.
If this is the world you people want to live in, congratulations.
It'd be so fun to see.
Like, truly, what does what does professional tennis do if these women who they've lauded, who they've made professional stars out of, like worldwide superstores stars out of, and in part based on their backstory, based on their race, based on whatever, certainly gender, if they start losing to somebody who's biologically male who just declares, I'm no longer, I'm trans.
I'm bringing my penis and my white skin over into women's tennis.
I hope it happens.
I really hope it happens.
I hope somebody decides to do it.
And then we'll see.
Then the rubber meets the road.
All right, Dave.
I'm bringing my penis.
They're not even going to use a racket.
I'm bringing my penis and this is how we're going to do it.
I'm going to think about that during the commercial break.
I might have to work on the slogan a little.
Okay, I confess.
All right, stand by.
We're going to do a commercial.
We're going to do more with Dave coming up.
Dave Dubin is here today.
His new book, Don't Burn This Country, Surviving and Thriving in Our Woke Dystopia is out today.
It's a great read.
It's a fast read.
Dave makes very salient points.
He gets in and out.
He doesn't bore you on a subject.
He doesn't use word salad.
So you'll appreciate this and you'll laugh too.
In fact, here's one part I highlighted that I laughed out loud on.
We don't want to be numbed and silenced and kept in the dark.
This is speaking to the fact that so many people in America, the majority, two-thirds, are afraid to say the things they believe because they fear that others might find them offensive.
I mean, two-thirds of the country is censoring itself because they're worried about offense.
Just offend.
Just defend.
Just do it.
It's fine.
People survive.
Anyway, you go on to say, we don't want to be controlled by a small fraction of hysterical people amplified by algorithms and media.
We don't want to live like hamsters in a cage being fed once a week and occasionally being put in a plastic ball that will undoubtedly fall down the stairs.
Sorry, Chippy.
Wait, what?
Censorship and Indoor Weddings 00:15:10
What happened to Chippy?
Oh, it's a sad story, Chippy.
Chippy was my gerbil in first grade.
And Chippy went the same way many gerbils go.
Many gerbils, your hamsters, your other small rodents that are the children's first pet.
Chippy was in the ball.
We thought everything was going to be fine.
And Chippy got a little close to the stairs and yada, yada, yada.
Chippy was in a shoebox later in the day in the backyard, but he lived a good life.
He had a good run.
That was 1981, I believe.
He had a good run, Chippy.
He was a good poor chippy.
By the way, Megan, can I just say, not only were you lovely enough to give me a nice blurb on the back of the book and you're going to join me in West Nyack, which I'm super psyched for, but you even worded, you even got tequila in the blurb.
You even wrote about drinking some tequila with me.
And I thought, that is as good as it gets.
If you would have told me 10 years ago, when I was nobody, I was nothing, that one day Megan Kelly would be blurbing my book and talking about drinking tequila with me.
Like, how much better does it get than that?
Come on.
See how I love.
I see, I understand.
I love.
And we did have good times drinking to kill you, David, to whom the book is dedicated.
The other David, you say not yourself.
That's your, your husband.
He's your Dave.
He's David.
And you told me a very sweet story about you guys in the 2016 election.
What was that?
Was it 2016 election and you were both asked?
I'm trying to remember the exact question.
I'll let you take it.
Oh, well, are you talking about the Trump question you're asking?
I don't know.
It's about like, no, wasn't it like, who would you, who would you sleep with if you went on the cross?
Oh, oh, oh.
Oh, no, that was at our wedding.
Wow, we're really going to do this one publicly, huh?
So at our wedding, which we got married in August of 2015, our moms, we had a very small wedding, just our immediate families, and we each had one friend and we did a week in Sonoma.
It was really fantastic at a house because our families had been living all over the world and we wanted everybody to really make sure they could get to know each other for a week.
And then we got married on the last day and there was a lot of wine and it was really great.
So on the last day before the wedding, our moms did a little newlywed game where they took each of us separately and asked us a whole bunch of different questions.
And we didn't know what the, they asked us the same questions, but we didn't know what the questions were, obviously.
And I didn't know that he was being asked questions or anything like that.
The question that we both got asked was, if you could sleep with one other person, a celebrity, who would it be?
Now, in that we're both marrying dudes, you might have thought we would have both answered men.
But no, we both, by total coincidence, and this was announced at the dinner after we got married and they were going through the game.
We both said Megan Kelly.
This was meant to be.
This was meant to be.
It's an intellectual love affair.
That's what it is.
It's intellectual.
You know, this could get very awkward at our next dinner, but you know.
You know what?
Well, here in Connecticut, we did actually find out that there's a healthy swinging population.
No one's offered to me and to Doug to swing yet, nor will that go well if they do.
But apparently this is a growing thing, Dave, where like there's swingers everywhere.
And I said to Doug, I, my own belief is only unattractive people are swingers.
Like if you're, if you're very good looking and you marry another very good looking person, I like, why would you want to swing?
Is he like, I already got the steak.
I'm not going to go swing with the burger.
You got to watch out up there because the Clintons live somewhere near there, right?
So you know Bill is definitely maxing out those things right now.
Nobody wants a part of that.
I mean, he is not looking very good these days.
If Bill and Hillary ask us to swing, we're doing it.
We're not going to, we're not going to see it through to the end, but we're definitely going to see how far they're going to take it.
Like at what point is this going to get shut down?
Like, come on.
Wouldn't you like to see like, does Hillary have a sexual side?
There's no way Hillary is a sexual being in any way, is there?
No.
There's like eight things that I could say right now that would probably get us all banned from Sirius and YouTube and everything else.
So suffice to say, I don't want to do it with Hillary Clinton.
Wait, here's another question for you.
My friends and I were discussing this today.
Very important text chain.
You know, when you see the couples where the one half wears the mask and the other half doesn't, and they're both young and they seem perfectly healthy.
It's not like somebody's elderly.
Do you think, so the one friend was asking, do you think that the woman, if it's the woman, does she wear the mask during intimate relations?
Does she ever take the mask off?
She's only with him, like they're in the car.
Does she wear it when they're intimate?
And my other friend was like, they're not intimate.
Those couples are not having sex.
And I was like, that's the correct answer.
Why would you share bodily fluids with somebody whose breath you won't intake?
Right.
At this point, two years later, if you're still wearing a mask, and of course there are, we're not talking about elderly people or immunocompromised people.
Okay.
But if you're just a relatively young, healthy couple and one of you or both of you is still wearing a mask, that is the signal.
should just wear a hat that says, I have not been laid since the pandemic started.
It should just be on you or a, you know, scarlet letter, something like that.
Cause come on already with this.
My God, I'm thinking about Dr. Fauci and Rochelle Walensky now in a whole new light.
No wonder they're so miserable.
Well, no, they're not wearing masks.
They just want us to be masked, but you know that these are the highest level hypocrites that you can possibly imagine.
You know, Fauci telling, I still can't get over the one where at the height of COVID, you know, you probably saw the email where he told a friend of his emailed him and said, we're all going on vacation with the kids.
I think they were going to Mexico.
Should we wear masks?
And he basically says no.
And he also says the kids will probably touch their face more.
And then meanwhile, about two weeks later, he's telling us all to double mask.
I mean, the guy unbooks.
Of course.
Did you see the latest news now?
Now they're remasking in Philly.
Indoor mask mandates are back because of this rise in this latest variant, which of course is no more deadly, no more deadly than even Omicron was.
But okay, we just have to look at case numbers again.
I thought we weren't doing that.
Philly indoor mask mandate and now transportation.
I can't stand Pete Buttigieg having control over my face when I'm on an airplane, a bus, a train.
I resent it.
I'd rather he just spent more time with his babies.
Like, go focus on them.
Your instincts were exactly right.
Don't focus on us because you're making all the wrong decisions.
And now they're saying that they may extend the mask mandate that was supposed to come off next week beyond that because again, the variant.
But you've got 10 airlines saying this is absurd.
All the people who get on our airplanes can congregate in churches, in malls, at baseball games, in indoor arenas on top of one another.
But they, when in an airplane with controlled airflow, have to wear a mask.
What sense does this make?
Megan, the truth is, and we all know this now, none of this has made any sense from the beginning, but they will not stop until we just refuse to participate.
So I live in Free Florida now.
And guess what?
While 99% of the people that I see, whether I'm at Whole Foods or at Target or at the park or anywhere else, are not wearing masks, sometimes you see people wear masks, even riding a bike.
And you know what?
So be it.
If that's how you choose to live and you have your reasons, that's just fine.
That's the way a mature society would operate.
If you would like to wear a mask on a plane for whatever reason you so choose, then do it.
But the endless hypocrisy, I mean, if you're a parent right now in Philadelphia and they're going to put masks on your kids again, which they're still doing to toddlers, I think in New York City right now, there's literally no science to back that.
They are not going to stop until you say to them, either I'm leaving and all of the productive, functional people will leave these cities and then they will be left to become the dystopian nightmares that in many cases they are.
You either have to leave or you have to bring in new people.
But the way the machine or whatever you want to call it operates, it just pushes us and pushes us.
And if you look, if you just step away for a moment and you think about what happened these last two years, if you think about it as just a test, it was just a test.
What will Americans do when everything that they've come to know and love is challenged?
Well, pretty much everybody fails.
Everybody.
And we could all look in the mirror to say we all did to some degree.
I think I'm proud to say that pretty quickly after the two weeks, I pretty much woke up, I would say by week three or by week four.
And I would give everybody a very long leash at the beginning of this.
But at this point, how come we never saw any videos of any hospitals anywhere that were really overrun, of homeless encampments that were run, of places where they don't have proper water sanitation and everything else in Africa, perhaps, that there was mass death?
We didn't see it anywhere throughout the world.
That is not to say COVID didn't exist.
I got COVID in December.
I had Omicron.
I'm not vaccinated.
I had leg pains for three days.
David got it at the same time.
He's also not vaccinated.
He actually was sick for a couple of weeks, but we made the choices for ourselves.
By the way, we also got it.
We had just moved to Florida where we were able to get monoclonal treatment and ivermectin immediately, where in California, you could not get it.
And the federal government, in fact, stopped Florida from allowing the monoclonal treatment, although now they're saying that they're going to stock up on it again.
So everything from top down here has been done backwards.
The only resolution to any of this is that if they're going to start bringing this stuff back, you must fight it or you must leave or live like a slave.
Live like someone that is just fed crumbs now and again, like a fish in a bowl or a hamster in a little ball and just know that somebody, somebody above you is controlling you and accept it and move on.
And it's everywhere, you know, these officials who shouldn't be controlling us in our cities, school officials who are imposing.
I mean, I was saying yesterday, my sixth grader is home all week because he was exposed to a COVID positive kid on Saturday night for a short time.
And now it's not, I mean, it's in part the school's fault, but it's really the CDC that's still recommending kids like my kid who doesn't have COVID.
He's 100% fine.
He's tested negative repeatedly and he doesn't have symptoms.
He has to sit at home for five days.
Why?
Why?
Because he had a brief exposure to this.
This is absurd.
It's they shouldn't have these powers over us, you know, and it spreads to big tech because you don't understand the subject of your book.
But Megan, the point is, and this really is the point of the book, is that I'm sorry to interrupt you, but this is the point.
They only have the power over you until you say you do not have power over me anymore.
So I would ask you actually.
So your kids, I mean, have you seen a marked change in their behavior or attitude in these last two years?
Because I know a lot of parents with kids around your kids' age that are seeing a huge difference.
Like what are you seeing within your kids?
So no, because I've been lucky.
I mean, we moved to Connecticut, which has acres and acres of land and the ability to do school outside and to distance the children.
Now they did have to have the damn masks on and they were driving all three of my kids crazy.
But that's, I don't even count that given what's happened to other children in this whole pandemic as, you know, ranking in response to your question because the masks are off now and there are kids who have committed suicide, tried to commit suicide, been incredibly depressed, you know, not eaten, been subjected to severe abuse inside the home, none of which counts to Dr. Fauci.
None of it, none of that registers, doesn't qualify even as public health.
So anyway, my kids were on the lucky side because they went to schools that were open.
They were allowed to go.
They had to do all the nonsense with the plexiglass and the masks and all that.
And our school has a mandatory vaccine, which we haven't complied with.
But yeah, it's tough.
And parents are placed in a tough position because Dave, like, if things go south for us here, what are we going to do?
Move again?
And then move again?
It's like at some point, find out soon, you have to offer some stability in your child's life.
Right.
So, so of course, for me, without kids yet, I can't speak fully to that.
And I fully empathize with that.
And as I said to you earlier, my sister moved with her kids from New York City to Florida in the midst of this.
And I get, especially your kids are a little, my kids, her kids were, you know, three and five.
It's a little bit easier to move than once they hit 12 and they have all the friends and all that sports and all that stuff.
So I completely get that.
And I can't fully speak to that from a personal experience.
But I would say actually the answer is yes, you do have to move.
You have to move.
And then what you have to do, I think, is the next version of this is that you then have to secure the new place that you're in.
So certainly where you are now is obviously better for a million reasons than being in sort of the belly of the beast of New York City.
For me leaving Los Angeles, I could have gone virtually anywhere except say Portland, Seattle, San Francisco or New York City, and it basically would have been better.
However, I chose Florida and I chose it for a reason.
only I live in the Miami suburbs, Miami is now a tech hub because all of the people fleeing all of these places, all of the same people from the tech world of San Francisco, they've all moved here.
I'm friends with a lot of them and I go to a lot of events with these people.
They're never voting Democrat again.
Now, that doesn't mean that the Republicans are right, but I always say you don't have to be a Republican, but you cannot be a Democrat at this point.
We have to secure the states that can be secured.
We have to secure the cities that can be secured.
So it may just be that because of the proximity to New York City and the lunacy that is focused there, that the tri-state area, and again, I grew up there.
This is an area I know really well and loved for much of my life.
It may just be that that area cannot function in a decent way anymore, unless you really want to disconnect and live off the grid, which is sort of impossible if you have young kids.
But there will be places that will thrive.
I think Florida is the prime example of it.
Obviously, I think Texas is going to be fine, actually.
There's been some worry about it flipping, but I think Texas will be fine.
I think Tennessee will be fine.
There are other red states that'll be fine.
I think Arizona is going to shift back red.
And again, I don't mean to make this partisan like Republican versus Democrat, but it is.
And that's the weird thing.
That's the weird position that someone like me who in 2016 was a Bernie supporter would be saying right now.
Right.
Well, and I should say, it wasn't easy for you to leave Los Angeles anyway.
I mean, I visited you guys.
You had this beautiful home you had just moved into.
You decorated it.
It was like an oasis for you.
You had your studio built there.
It wasn't all that easy for you to say, we're out of here.
You know, it's not like you had no logistical obstacles preventing that, but you had enough.
And I was with you guys as you were sort of getting to that point.
It was like, oh my God, it's gone crazy.
You know, the city's crazy.
The state's crazy, but we can make it work.
And then slowly but surely, the downward spiral into there's no winning this fight here.
Look, as you know, I campaigned with Larry Elder for the recall and the recall went incredibly poorly for a series of reasons that we don't have to get into now.
I will tell you that one, one of the reasons I think it did go poorly was that they pushed everything to mail-in ballots, which where you don't have to show ID even when you're in person.
So I voted in person.
Surrogacy, Twins, and Parenting 00:17:10
You don't have to show ID.
I actually tried to show my ID and the guy kind of flinched at me.
Like, no, no, no, no, we don't do that here.
As if I had pulled out a weapon, something like that.
But no matter which way you folded the ballot, because they give you a normal size envelope, so you can only fold, you know, you can fold it three ways, only so many different directions.
You could either look through the, I kid you not, you could either look through the envelope and on one side see the vote for Larry Elder, or on the other side, you could see the vote for yes on recall.
So no matter which way you folded it, I swear to you, you didn't even need an iPhone camera, you know, flashlight to look at it.
You just could hold it up to the sunlight and see.
Now, do you think that maybe there's some fraudulent activity there?
I'm actually not even saying there is, but the point is my trust in the system in the place that I live had been completely decimated.
And when you don't have trust in the system at that point, on top of the fact that every, you know, the crime was going up in the homeless and all that stuff, then at some point you have to say, okay, this is my life.
And do I want to fund my own demise with my tax money and my skills?
And one of the things that was tricky for me is, you know, I have a production company, so I have a bunch of guys that work for me, a bunch of guys and girls.
And I had to say to everybody, hey, I want to go.
Will you join me?
And I was worried.
Every single person within 10 seconds said, yes, I'm coming when I was leaving.
All right.
Stand by.
More with Dave coming up.
There's plenty to get to, including his children, that he's now expected two of them to be exact.
Now, when I look at your book tour, it begins on April 19th.
It has 14 stops, including yours truly on April 26th and West Nyack.
If people would like to come see the two of us, April 26th and West Nyack.
Here's some other dates.
Glenn Beck, April 24th in Dallas.
Andrew Clavin, love him.
Just was on April 21st in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Dennis Prager, May 11th in Brea, California.
Larry Elder, May 12th in Oxnard, California.
Douglas Murray.
Oh my God.
I love these people.
May 15th in San Jose, California.
And the first stop on April 19th is with Donald Trump Jr. in Florida.
So that'll be fun.
And I thought to myself, my God, how does he have time to go all over these places?
This is amazing.
The number of stops he's going to.
And I'm predicting now with your third book, when that comes out a year from now and you have two babies sitting there in your house.
Your book tour is going to look like this.
Miami?
I might do a live hit from Miami, my home.
Yeah, from the bottom.
Enjoy it while you can, right?
Enjoy it while you can because your freedom is about to change, but your happiness is too.
All right.
So explain to the world that doesn't understand, because I understand how a gay man can have a baby, but I didn't understand how you could have two different babies coming within like a few months of one another.
Like twins, I get these are not exactly twins.
Explain what's happening.
Yeah.
So let me preface this all by saying this is a little confusing.
And even as one of the guys involved in this situation, it is a little confusing.
And I've had to have a lot of talks with fertility people and with doctors and with all sorts of people to make some sense of this.
But I should also say, Megan, I'm not a biologist.
So you're going to have to work with me here when I'm giving you some basics on how babies are born.
But generally speaking, women have eggs and men have sperm.
When these two things meet each other, you then get an embryo, which eventually, of course, becomes a baby.
There's my husband David and I.
And yes, we also have the same name, which people think is hilarious.
But in essence, what we did do is we got one egg donor.
And when you get an egg donor, you get a certain amount of eggs.
Sometimes you get a lot of eggs.
Sometimes you get just one egg.
Sometimes you get no eggs.
And actually, you would probably find it very interesting that in the course of COVID, there was a huge problem.
There were two problems actually related to surrogacy.
They were finding, at least our doctor, who's one of the best in the world, was finding that the quality of eggs was not as good as usual, which they couldn't really find any scientific evidence for.
They need a lot of time, obviously, to research that.
That's he could really only chalk up to general stress that was going on with the women's bodies.
And then they had another problem related to surrogacy, which is that the pool of women who generally are surrogates, they tend to lean a little more conservative.
And actually, a lot of them, even those who are willing to be surrogates for same-sex couples, they tend to be a little more religious.
And that pool of women, many of them did not want to get vaccinated, but the governing body of whoever handles the surrogacy situation, they wanted the surrogates to be vaccinated.
So you had a low quality of eggs, and then you had women who were generally the surrogates, a high percentage of them who did not want to get vaccinated.
So there was a huge problem in the last two years related to surrogacy.
But to directly answer your question, the two boys that we'll be having, and they are boys, it is not, that is a biological reality that they are male.
It is not something that we can choose or they can choose.
They come from the same eggs, so the same biological mother.
And then one of them is from my sperm and one of them is from David's sperm.
And then we have two surrogates.
So one will be born.
How does that happen?
God, how does what happen?
Yeah, because normally you find one surrogate and you're like, great, here's here are the, you know, whatever.
I know it's just her eggs.
I got it.
But you basically are like, here are the embryos.
Could you please carry one or two to term?
And she's like, sure, right?
That's how generally surrogacy works.
So how did you guys decide you were going to have two different babies and two different surrogates at once?
So what happened was, well, a few things happened.
Well, first off, they really don't do twins or multiple pregnancies as much as they used to.
It's considered a higher risk pregnancy.
And although usually twins is not a real risk to the kids, to the babies or to the mother, it is considered a higher risk pregnancy.
There is some degree there.
So there are less surrogates that are willing to do twins, which we sort of knew that we wanted to have two anyway.
So that was one issue.
But then what happened was over the course of the couple of years that we've been trying this, there were a couple of miscarriages involved.
And we realized that, you know, the clock is ticking.
I'm 45 years old.
I want to be able to play catch with these kids.
I want them to see when I'm in the WNDA, as I said earlier.
So basically what happened, yeah, basically what happened was when the first one was a confirmed pregnancy and we were, you know, as enough weeks in to feel comfortable with that, we said, let's just, let's just keep going because we didn't know is the second one going to take three more years.
And then by chance, the second one took and here we are.
So yeah, I've got till August, but I've had a pretty good run, Megan, 45.
You know, I've done what I wanted basically when I wanted to do it.
And it's time for that next phase.
Well, I mean, your life will, of course, change dramatically.
And especially having two at once, your free time is going to go away like that.
You'll be shocked at how tired you are all the time.
I mean, I can speak to this having become a mother at 38 and then I had a second at 40 and I had my third at 42.
And all I could think was there's a reason God cuts you off.
There's a re he knows you can't.
I don't have it in me.
And when they're little, they're so needy.
You know, it's like every second they need you to have eyes on them and so on.
And, you know, if you want to be a present parent, you want it too, even though not every moment is ideal.
Okay.
So two boys.
And what do you like?
I know this is sort of a weird question, but like, why did you want to have kids?
Why was it important to you?
What do you, what do you hope will happen to you, to your life?
Yeah.
Well, first off, I'm completely happy to talk to you about this personally or professionally.
We happen to do a lot of the same stuff that we do privately.
We do on camera, which can be a little weird sometime, but there's really nobody I'd rather discuss this with.
And there's a lot of issues around it that I'm happy to get into as well.
You know, there were a couple of things that were happening.
First off, you know, I'm 45, as I said.
So when I grew up, especially first, I struggled.
I was with my sexuality.
I was in the closet for a long time.
I never envisioned a future for myself.
That really is the truth.
I never thought of a future.
I didn't think of a family, either married to a woman or a man or anything.
I just lived.
That's just what it was.
It's hard to really fully understand in retrospect, but I just kind of lived each day would come and go.
And that was it.
When I met David, things started to change a little bit.
And he is a little bit younger than me.
So when he was growing up, you know, it was sort of becoming obvious that gay people would be allowed to be married.
It was a little more normal to be gay.
You know, when I was a kid or younger, at least in the 80s and the 90s, there were no role models to look at.
You know, you had Paul Lind from the 70s on Hollywood Squares or like there was only sort of these over-the-top clowns or Harvey Feierstein or whatever.
And I'm not even judging these people, but there were things, it just had nothing to do with who I was or who, how I behave.
And yet there was this other part of me that's somehow connected with that.
David grew up in a world where that was really changing where it became sort of mainstream to be gay.
I would say we've now jumped the shark of gay in mainstream and now we've gone to something much different.
You know, we've gone from equality to something really bizarre related to all of the gender identity stuff.
But he really wanted kids.
And I thought, well, okay, I'm married to somebody who really wants something to live the best life for themselves.
Like, am I going to be the person to deny him that?
That was one thing.
And then the other thing that I wrote about in my first book was that I was on tour with Jordan Peterson.
And one of the things that Jordan talked about almost every single night was the need for most people, not everybody, but for most people to live the fully complete life.
Part of that is being a parent.
And then ultimately part of that is being a grandparent.
That it is not to say everybody.
There are some people who, through their own artistic pursuits or whatever it might be, can live a full good life without that.
But almost everybody needs that experience.
And I think that's what we inherently know.
It's what you're saying to me sort of when you're saying, oh, you know, the free time will disappear, but something else is going to happen.
There is something that you, Megan, know as a parent about the world that I don't know yet.
And I think it's probably something worth knowing.
That really is the truth.
It's funny because in a way, I see, you know, parenthood as a shield against so much of the nonsense that's out there, you know, because if your home life is shorn up, if you're happy there, if you've set it up the way you want it to be set up, very little can really hurt you.
It's like, all right, everything on the outside can boil down to dollars and cents.
And that can be stressful.
I understand.
I had a part of my life where that was me too.
But you look around, you're going to see those two boys on the couch.
Let's say when they're, you know, three or five and they're sitting next to David and you're watching some stupid TV or you're showing them some show that you guys both loved at some point.
And they're sweet.
And ideally, they're a little tired.
Like your children best, just like my dog.
If Strudd looks tired, he's amazing.
Anyway, and you think, I am good.
I'm good.
There's very little, you know, some blogger, some nasty.
I know, actually, I was, my team was pointing out one of your tweets that where you were saying, I have a, this is the quote, I have a couple hilariously bad hit pieces incoming.
One by a quote journalist who lied to me about the intentions of the piece has repeatedly lied to over a dozen people about the story so he could get them on the record while sending me his requests.
So that can cause some kind of stress.
It's like you have your book.
You don't want some jerk writing a hit piece on you and where he lured your friends into commenting.
It's meaningless.
I am here to tell you.
It's meaningless.
It's so meaningless, Dave.
That hit piece will not affect a single person who is going to buy your book in one way or who is open-minded to you in one way, shape or form.
I know just from having lived it so many years, but I also know that like when the babes are there, like the back to the image of the kids on the couch with David, you're going to be like, write whatever you want.
I'm good.
You can't hurt me.
You know, I always think of the line from Jerry McGuire from the crazy Kelly Preston character.
And she's like, you can't hurt me, Jerry.
I'm too strong for you.
That's you and the world when you have kids and you've quote centered them to borrow the woke left term.
But like you really have.
You centered your life around family, around meaning, around what really will sustain you in the dark hours, not all the BS.
And it's not to say there's no meaning without the children.
It's just next level when they're there.
You know, it's funny.
I could say I think you're right, but I know you're right.
Like that.
And I think that was Jordan's point when he was saying this about people having that need to end up living a life that is truly full to get to that.
It's like, I can listen to you say that.
And intellectually I can say, oh, that sounds right.
But it's not really what I'm thinking right now.
It's, I know you are right.
I know that that is what the complete life is.
It is something so innately human that we all sort of know that.
And that isn't to say that there isn't a part of me that right now, as our first child will be born in August, I'm kind of like, oh man, we got to have all the fun we can and have all the crazy nights.
Not that we do anything crazy.
I usually fall asleep watching Seinfeld at 1030, but like, we're like, I just got to get out there and do everything I can when I want so that I'm not always having to take a nap because everyone keeps telling me how tired I'm going to be.
But I know.
You can't say that.
Like, like you've got to store up your sleep.
I know that you're right.
You go, so you got to store up your sleep or store up your fun.
Like that's how life works.
You know, people always say when you're pregnant with a baby, like, make sure you sleep.
Sleep now.
It's like, is that how sleep works?
Can I bank it?
I can like, I think you can bank it.
I think you can bank it.
I don't think so.
All right.
So I get it and I support it.
And I'm very excited for you guys.
And I'm going to have to think about like what I should put in.
Like when Julie Bender has had her baby at Fox, I had just had mine.
So I put her together like the best new mother basket because I had just been through it.
And it was like the F factor diet, which I love, Tanya.
Poor Tanya Zuckerbreck took a beating from some woman who wrote mean stuff about her in the press too, but I love that diet.
It works.
Like some exercise videos that I liked, DVDs, so on and so forth.
I knew exactly the liquor she liked.
Anyway, so now I got to think about you guys because you don't have to lose the weight.
Oh, I gave her like these nipple covers.
You don't have to worry about that.
So in some ways, you're going to get a lot of things.
Well, you know the liquor I like.
And I'll take the nipple covers.
I don't know what I'm going to do with them, but they probably, they could probably double up as something else.
It rains a lot in Florida.
I don't know.
They could clog a leak or something.
I have no idea.
That's a good point to pivot for a moment to the unpleasant reaction by some.
I think overwhelmingly it's been nice and supportive and loving.
But I have noticed that like there's kind people like Ali Beth Stuckey, who's Christian.
I know you're friends with her.
And she said, I talked to Dave before I did this piece online to tell you that I don't support this because she's, but she believes in biblical marriage and she doesn't believe, you know, two guys should be having a baby together, that kind of thing.
I thought she came from a place of kindness and love and just offered a thoughtful comment on it because her audience kind of expected her to.
And she had things she wanted to say.
Then there's mean people who write something like, quote, this is evil.
This is evil, plain and simple.
They paid for the creation of roughly 18 unique individual human beings just so that two of them could be successfully implanted in rented wombs and delivered to their purchasers.
To make it sound so trans it's like, this is so.
My friend Melissa Francis, she talked about it on my show.
She got a surrogate.
She had a blood issue that almost killed, she would say, two of her, her first two children when she delivered them.
So on baby number three, she got a surrogate.
Surrogates can play an important role.
Why should gays and lesbians not have the joys of passing on that love?
The biggest losers in our country can have babies.
Like the biggest do nothing, awful losers who are hateful, murderous, criminal creeps can get together and have a baby.
And nobody says boo.
But if it's two guys or if it's two women, we have to say it's that's bull.
So anyway, your thoughts.
No.
Well, first off, I totally appreciate you bringing this up.
Look, 99% of what we got those couple days after we posted that picture was love, believe it or not.
You know, the funny thing about the internet, it has really dysregulated us in a crazy way.
So basically everyone that I'm publicly associated with or that I've had on my show that has any meaning to me, or certainly anyone that I'm friends with privately, we got endless amounts of love.
There were some people like Ali Beth who expressed her own personal religious opinion, which by the way, I completely am okay with someone.
I respect religious liberty.
She's entitled to her own belief and I'm not asking her to marry a woman and have kids with that woman.
So that's just fine.
What I don't want is someone's personal religious beliefs infringing on my own personal liberty.
And we can talk further about the tensions between those two things because I think that there are some tensions there.
But the funny thing is the way the internet works is, Megan, if we put this video up and it gets a million views, 990,000 people watch it and they don't do anything.
They don't comment.
Embryo Decisions and Gender Roles 00:10:13
They just watch it.
And maybe they watch the entire thing or maybe they watch 10 seconds or whatever.
And maybe they agreed with us.
Maybe they didn't, but we don't know because all we know is that they watched.
What happens because of the comments is the 10,000 people who comment generally comment something more angry or not resentful.
It's some sort of conflict that they want to comment on, right?
And then they know that the way the alga algorithms work and to get clicks, the crazier you write, the more upvotes you're going to get and the rest of it.
And then the average person goes to that video a week later and sees the video and they go, boy, look at this video.
It got a million views and all the comments are negative.
Boy, there's really something brewing here.
That wasn't the reality that we faced at all.
That's not to say there weren't negative comments.
There were.
And again, I believe people can have their own personal religious liberty and come from things from a different perspective than I do.
But I would also say that you make a really good point that, you know, virtually anyone, any heterosexual couple can have kids literally off a one-night stand.
And we don't have to go into the litany of horrible things that children can be born into, whether it's a crack addicted kid or an abusive father or a negligent mother or just all of the imaginable and I would say unimaginable things that can happen.
That isn't to say that I don't think and David doesn't think that the role of the mother is vitally important, vitally important.
And families can still look a little bit different and be perfectly good and functioning.
We're going to have David's mom move down with us for a couple of months.
His sister is going to move down here, who has been a nanny for young toddlers, young children before.
My sister, who I was talking about before, just moved to Miami.
She's actually pregnant with her third right now, due the day before our first is born.
So we are going to have my mom's going to be down as much as possible.
So we're going to have strong women and strong female influences to teach us some of this stuff.
And then some of this is also related to gender roles, which are real.
You know, there are men, generally men like things and women like people, but there are men who are very nurturing and there are women who are not very nurturing.
David happens to be very nurturing.
I don't know that I'm going to be the most nurturing, but we're going to try to fill in all of those pieces and create the happiest, most loving, safest, because I think that's what you want to create.
Not a safe space, but a safe place for your child to thrive and grow up to be the best as possible.
But I'm not saying it's not a little different and a little weird.
And by the way, I don't have a lot of models for this.
I have really only really one or two sets of friends that are gay that have kids.
And we're going to try to learn a little bit from them.
But I don't need to learn from gay parents.
I can learn from straight parents and we're going to do the best that we can.
I think that's great.
I think, I do think, you know, having a role model is important, right?
Like that's one of the things I like about being in my marriage with Doug, male, female, obviously, is, you know, they get different things from him than they get from me.
But we're not totally like traditional on our gender roles either.
You know what I mean?
Like, obviously, I've got this more public facing career where I don't think I've said before, I know Doug doesn't mind me saying I'm the primary wage earner in the relationship.
I wasn't always.
When I met him, I borrowed money off of him.
I couldn't move into my New York City apartment.
They needed first month and last month and security department.
I didn't have it.
They get you.
They get you in New York.
They get you.
It was a lot.
Anyway, so back then I was borrowing money from him, but whatever.
My point is like non-traditional now currently in that way.
It works.
It's fine.
I do, I like the idea of bringing in strong women just so that these young boys then have, they have the model.
They can see there it is.
And you get different things from a nurturing mom than you get from a nurturing dad.
So I think that's a good, that's a good workaround.
But the notion that you just shouldn't do it because you're in a gay relationship is absurd to me.
And the notion of like, I get the problem of creating embryos that then are there.
And I have to tell you, and I've told you this before, I did IVF on all three of my pregnancies and I really wrestled with that, you know, like I'm Catholic, but I wouldn't describe myself as like religious.
But there's no question to me, you're creating a life there.
And now what?
You know, it's like, my God, at some point I'm going to be forced to make a decision about those.
I lucked out in that I wound up using all of my embryos that were usable.
I mean, some in the sort of process don't make it through.
And that's a blessing because they're not all genetically well and they're not all genetically meant to go forward, but I tried.
So what about that piece of it?
Megan, it's a totally great question.
And by the way, it doesn't even, we don't even have to mention the person that the tweet that you just read about the 18 embryos.
But first off, you just acknowledge part of it.
Not all of them survive.
That's just part of the process.
So it's not like we're sitting on all of these embryos at the moment.
That's just one little piece.
And I don't want to get into every specific little piece of this.
But this does bring up all sorts of deeply religious, personal, philosophic issues.
So yes, if you have, if you, if you believe as a, as a human being, if you believe that the moment that the sperm meets the egg and you now have, you know, you have a blastocyst, but eventually you have an embryo, you know, those first few days and really for the first few weeks, you just have cells multiplying.
Now, I don't deny that that is the genesis of life.
If we are to believe that life begins at some point, and it obviously does, then that's really the only marker for that.
To me personally, and this is where politics and belief and religion all come in collision with each other, and you have to do what is right for you ultimately.
To me, there is a huge difference between taking a blastocyst at two days, the cells that are multiplying that has no form, obviously no heartbeat, no organs, no consciousness, nothing like that.
And whether that was to continue to become a baby or not, that is extremely different than, say, a 20-week abortion.
I would say it's actually quite different than even a 12-week abortion.
So even though I am pro-choice to some degree, I'm very strict with that.
I really am.
And I am okay with some of these laws that the Republican states have been pushing through because unfortunately the Democrats have gone so crazy with this and are okay with eight-month abortions and post-birth abortions.
I mean, some really weird stuff.
All that being said, that's a legitimate conversation to have if everyone can do it in a somewhat calm manner that we're doing it in right now.
If you have three embryos through IVF, if three embryos have survived and you only want one child, and these are in essence, you know, day or two day old embryos that are that are cells that are now frozen, what is it that you do with those?
Now, there's all sorts of things you can do with those.
And again, this is where I don't want to get into every personal decision that we're making.
You can give those embryos to other couples that can't get, have kids naturally.
There are heterosexual couples that for whatever reason, either through the woman's eggs or the male sperm or both, cannot get pregnant, but the woman could carry a kid.
You could donate that embryo.
There's all sorts of things you can do.
It's not just immediately that you have to discard those embryos.
So these are important discussions to have in a way, although it's been a little bit of a headache to talk about this because it does feel personal, but I am a public person to whatever extent I am.
If I've helped open up some of the door on some of this so that some of your listeners can really think about these issues, that's totally fine.
Yeah.
Well, it's like there's, you know, you could have a debate about the IUD, right?
Like that baby, the IUD gets, it gets rid of a fertilized embryo.
I mean, a fertilized egg inside the woman's uterus.
There are a lot of pro-life people who are against the IUD.
They understand that perfectly well.
But there are some people who would call themselves pro-life who are like, that's different.
The day after PEL, right?
Like where that's basically you've gotten pregnant and you want to get rid of that embryo before it turns into, you know, something more.
Well, that's why I'm saying that that's why I'm sliding.
Right.
So this is where, so I actually don't fully know.
I think I know your position on this mostly.
I don't fully, and obviously, you don't have to say anything you don't want to say.
If you had had, when you guys were going through this, and I know how difficult it is and how long it takes and all of that stuff, but if you had had one embryo left over that was a viable embryo, did you guys fully have that conversation as to what you were going to do?
And did you and Doug agree on what you were going to do?
Cause a lot of couples don't agree on that.
If we only had one left, we would have put it in.
Like we, we would have kept going.
I mean, I was getting to like as old as Methuselah.
So at some point, somebody was going to say, we can't put another one in you, ma'am, madam.
If you could take your.
your reading glasses off and put your gray-haired wig to the side, you could hear me better.
The answer is no.
But we would have done it for sure.
But like the fear was that, you know, when you're going into the process, you're going to wind up with five, you know, sitting next to five, right?
And it's like, well, there are limits to what I'm willing to do and capable of doing physically.
And thank God, I'm very glad I didn't have to make that decision.
But I have to say, if that had been the outcome, I wouldn't have regretted doing what I did.
I wouldn't have said this was a bad decision.
It just would have been a painful decision at the end.
I don't think I could see my and Doug's child grow up with someone else.
I don't think I could ever donate my embryo.
I don't think I could donate it to science.
I think probably I would have wound up like letting it defrost.
You know, that's sort of an option that you have.
But I don't know because it's, my God, it's like you think about it in the abstract, like life, when does it begin?
Whose is it?
And then you think about it like, that's my child.
That's another Yates or Yardley or Thatcher.
Like all you want is to make it happen.
Like put it in there.
And with all of mine, you know, I put in as like as many as were safe just so that I could sort of make sure I got pregnant and not have this problem.
But it's not for everybody's as lucky when you play the numbers game.
You could just wind up with a lot.
So I appreciate the situation.
It is not my judgment that I'm asking about in any way, shape.
Protecting Your Brain from Tech 00:15:43
It's just, you know, I've read it on the internet.
But anyway, back to the overall point, which is 99% positive.
And also typical of you being so open about it, giving us a chance to question our beliefs on it, learn a little bit about ourselves, wrestle with stuff we hadn't wrestled with before.
You love that.
You're not a judger.
You don't, you're not judging your haters.
And even though the ones who are judging you in a cruel way, you're still allowing for the conversation and not passing your judgment back.
One of the many things I love about Dave Rubin.
Stand by.
Megan, you can.
You can also block your haters, which is pretty good.
You can.
Now you tell me?
Quick, you been?
I'll send you.
I'll send you, I'll text you the instructions on how to do that.
I love mute, where they don't know you.
Mute's good too.
Love, I don't need, I don't, I think it was Ray Kelly, right?
Police commissioner under Rudy Giuliani for part, who said, why would you give your enemies the benefit of telling them how you feel about them?
Why would you show your actual feelings to your enemies?
I'm like, oh, that.
Right.
They don't get to know that I blocked them.
They don't get to know that they irritated me.
They get to know nothing.
They don't get to know that I saw their mean tweet.
They just get muted so they can't see anymore.
Ha ha.
I love it.
That's very ancient Chinese proverb.
Okay.
Stand by.
Much, much more with the one and only Dave Rubin coming up.
So Dave, one of the chapters you tackle in here, it's got a lot of great life advice just, you know, on how people can manage this crazy world we're living in right now, whether it's the wokeism or the fast pace or big tech or misinformation, actual misinformation, not Hunter Biden's laptop, that's being shoved on you by the mainstream media that has an agenda or college campuses that have an agenda and so on.
And chapter three is entitled Protect Your Brain at All Costs.
And you write in here about how every August you take your digital break.
And it's hardcore digital break.
I mean, it's not like, I just stay off email.
So explain to us, again, what that looks like and what, like, what do you mean to when you say to people, protect your brain at all costs?
Yeah, you know, this is something I've done for the last five years where in August, I quite literally lock my phone in a safe with my computer and my iPad and whatever other devices that I have, my Game Boy, all of it, it's gone.
And I do not read the news.
I do not watch the news.
I don't watch television.
I don't do anything with any electronic device whatsoever.
We usually go on vacation for a little bit.
So try to go somewhere in the Caribbean or something just to kind of stare out at the ocean and exercise and eat right and just detox from the endless onslaught of information that we're all inundated with constantly.
You know, we got on social media 20 years ago, thinking it would make us more social.
And it was originally very cool and you could connect with old high school friends and all of that stuff.
And 20 years later, we now know, I mean, there's plenty of studies that prove this.
It's made us more anxiety ridden.
We're angrier.
We're more polarized.
We doom scroll.
Everyone's done this.
This is when you get on Facebook or Twitter or wherever and you just ignore all the good things, just waiting for a bad thing to happen.
And then you stop and you read the bad thing and then you move to another bad thing.
Or just the way all of these feeds are curated.
If I'm not even on Facebook anymore, but when you're, when you're on, you know, when I'm sitting on a plane, sometimes I'll be sitting next to someone with an iPad and you watch, you know, you just can't stop looking at what somebody's doing.
And none of it makes sense.
It's like baby picture, terrorist attack, Donald Trump, sports game, Joe Biden.
And it's just this constant attack on our ability to think clearly and have normal human reactions related to things.
So I did it five years ago.
It was sort of a joke, actually, the first time.
I was kind of like, can I do this?
Is this something that humans can possibly do?
The idea of taking one day off is very scary for people.
The idea of walking outside your house for five hours without a phone is scary for people.
But I've done it for five years.
I think actually, totally honestly, Megan, I think it's one of the things that has kept me sane throughout all of this, because you and I both know a lot of people that are in the same world that we're in.
And it can make you kind of crazy, you know, having to talk about politics all the time and not go crazy yourself and try to take what can often be very depressing news and do it in a way that doesn't make people crazier and everything else.
It can make you crazy.
And I think one of the ways I've been able to keep my head on straight is by doing that disconnect so that when I come back in September and I have somebody, maybe I'll have you do it with me if you're available in September this year.
I have somebody join me to tell me everything that I missed for the month.
So Glenn Beck's done it a couple of times and Michael Knowles and a few others, Ben Shapiro.
And you know what you realize is although this past summer I missed Afghanistan and of course it was horrific and the repercussions will be for years to come in terms of American foreign policy, my life went on.
And I don't mean to make it everything about me, but the point is the world will continue.
One day we will all be gone.
And the story that existed before us, it is going to exist after us.
And I think we're all so caught up in the minutiae of the day that when I talk about protecting your brain, it's like, give yourself a little ability.
You know, in the morning, how many of your viewers right now, we all do this.
I don't do it anymore.
But, you know, you have your phone on your nightstand.
And before you even get out of bed to have your coffee or go to the bathroom, you immediately look at the news and maybe you lay in bed for 10 minutes with that.
That's not the right way to start the day.
I try to start the day every day the same way.
I usually go to the bathroom, I have a cup of coffee, and I walk my dog without my phone.
And that is, to me, a great way to just reset at the beginning of the day.
And if you can figure out a few things that work for you, then I think you can actually protect your brain.
And it seems like we need that more than ever.
Social media has done something very weird to us and we all know it.
By the way, if you are the one sitting next to Dave Rubin on the flight and he's looking at your iPad, consider ipvanish.com slash LK.
You definitely should.
Isn't that one of those funny things?
You can't not look.
You know, it could be the most boring person reading the most mundane nothingness, but for whatever reason, your eye is just going, man, they doing something over there.
There's something happening.
My last flight, I got sucked into Curb Your Enthusiasm's 11th season, and I am not even a little sorry.
It has had me laughing out loud hysterically.
And that's a guy who I know we don't share the same politics and I'm mad that he yelled at poor Alan Dershowitz in Martha's Vineyard, but he's hysterical.
And the show is the whole season of very anti-woke.
So I just, I love it.
And I had such hearty laughs on it.
And the reason I put it on was because somebody else is watching it.
They're laughing.
I'm like, I'm going to give it a try.
And I'm so, so glad I did.
All right.
So I like that.
Can I just ask you about like the beginning in the beginning of August?
Do you get like the DTs?
You know, is it like that like phantom phone limb situation?
Yes, literally.
That phantom phone thing that we all know about.
I mean, think about that.
That is something that we all know that experience when you don't have your phone on you and you oddly feel a vibration in your pocket.
Isn't that a little weird?
Shouldn't we be thinking about what has happened to us that we all know about that experience?
What have these devices done to us?
So it is interesting.
Each year, the same thing has happened where there's a moment, you know, when I officially literally close the safe, or sometimes David closed the safe, when I know that I'm off, there's initially this first few hours of like pure joy.
Like, here we go.
It's going to be great.
And then suddenly about four hours later, or maybe a little bit after dinner, I'm like a little, ah, what did I miss?
Something must have happened.
How many people retweeted me saying goodbye for a month?
You know, all this real nonsense.
My out of nonsense.
Right, exactly.
And then what happens, I'll tell you one cool thing that has happened every single time.
And David, although he doesn't do a full off the grid, because in case there's an emergency or something, he keeps a phone on him that he look, he doesn't really care about the news as much, which is one reason we've managed to say, stay sane together, but he keeps a phone so that someone can get in touch with us if we're away or if there was a family emergency, something like that.
But one thing that's very cool that has happened to both of us over the time that we've done this is about a week in, I'll say to him, we'll just be taking a walk and I'll be like, you know, I can remember every single word to that song that I have not heard in 10 years.
Suddenly your brain just starts organizing itself in a different way.
We're constantly cluttering our brain with nonsense and even things that are important.
A lot of this is important, obviously.
But we're constantly inputting stuff.
And our brains, you know, if you think of your brain as sort of a computer, a computer only has a certain amount of RAM, meaning the immediate storage that it has, and then it has the long-term, the ROM storage, the long-term storage.
We're constantly overloading ourselves with all of this information.
And then suddenly I'll be thinking about songs.
I'll think about a friend.
Like it'll literally pop, boy, remember that kid in third grade, my friend Stefan.
I wonder whatever happened to him.
That will just pop into my brain out of nowhere where if I wasn't disconnected, I wouldn't have time to think about that sort of thing.
So there's something going on.
And I think if anyone watching this, I get, it's hard to do a month.
Forget a month.
Try a Saturday.
Try a Saturday.
As Ben Shapiro said to me once when I said I was doing this, he said, you know, Dave, Orthodox Jews have been doing this for about 5,000 years.
It's called Shabbat.
And, you know, and many Christians do a version of it on Sundays and or maybe for Lent or whatever it might be.
But if you can just try it once a week for a day, you might find the results actually are pretty good.
I want to do the August end of August thing with you, but I want to do it in like in quiz form, real or fake.
Did this really happen?
Or am I messing with you and see how you do?
No, that would be incredible because there's almost nothing you could make up that would be more bizarre.
So that's it.
We're doing it together in September.
It'd be better if Trump were still president.
That would be, that would be a better quiz with Biden.
Although Biden does give us a lot of fodder.
I mean, more than you would have expected.
I kind of thought that the good fodder was going to be gone with Trump, but to the contrary, there's plenty of fodder to discuss with him.
Can I ask you something as you were talking?
Because you were alive when there were no cell phones for a significant portion of your youth.
I was about, I've told the story before, but I was 25.
I was living in Chicago.
So it was 1995, 1996.
And somebody was walking down the street talking on the cell phone, like on the sidewalk.
And I was like, oh my God, what an idiot.
I'm like, who can't wait to get to point B, you know, from A to have a conversation on the phone.
So I was like, what was she doing?
Like, what's happening?
And of course, now look at us now.
So we all ask ourselves, would we go back?
Would you go back to a time when we didn't have the iPhone, when the Android, whatever hadn't been invented?
And we, when we were talking about getting away, I remember as a young practicing law lawyer, we didn't have email.
We did not have email.
The bosses could not email us.
There were beepers at my first firm.
You had to wear a beeper as a young lawyer because, of course, you always have to be accessible.
But we all used to take cruises for our vacations because they couldn't get you on the cruise.
Like the beeper wouldn't, nothing would work.
Clever, clever.
So you just go away.
Like there was a place to go where you were unreachable.
And it was awesome.
But I know you've got, you know, a big chapter in the book talking about how the work week has changed.
It's changed for the better.
And it wouldn't have changed if we didn't have the invention of the phone, you know, the iPhone, the Android, whatever.
So what do you think?
Were we better off before?
Man, it's really hard to say.
You know, all of these devices that we have and the access to technology and all of these things, they're tools in a certain respect.
You know, if you think about it, you could think about it sort of like fire.
The phone in some ways is like fire.
Fire is quite extraordinary in that it can heat your home and you can cook food on it.
It could also burn your home down and kill you if it's out of control.
And that's sort of what these things are.
You have to manage your relationship with your phone, with your computer, your iPad, and the entire thing.
So I don't know that I would turn back time so that none of these things were existed.
I mean, you know, I live a pretty full life that is obviously very connected to all of these devices.
So I wouldn't turn that away.
I think perhaps we should have thought about it a little bit more.
We should have been a little more thoughtful in the way we integrated all of this technology to our life and maybe had a little bit more of an understanding of what these tech companies were going to do and listening to us and sorting through our information, the algorithms.
But in retrospect, there's no way we could have ever known what was going to happen here.
And we all kind of do things and we go with the tide and all that stuff.
It's funny, you mentioned 1995 and beepers and phones and all that.
I remember in 1995, I was a sophomore in college and a kid down the hall in the dorm was yelling because he was on, I think he was saying he was on the internet, maybe saying the World Wide Web, something.
And he's yelling about it.
Now, before that, we had, man, I sound old right now, but we had text email.
And I don't even remember that I ever used it.
I remember I got to college.
They gave us an email address.
I didn't even know what that meant, really.
But now I'm a sophomore.
This kid is yelling down the hallway.
I'm on the internet.
I'm on the internet.
We all run into his room.
He's sitting there on the computer and I'll never forget it.
It says Yankees three, Royals one.
And there's a picture of the Yankees logo and a picture of the Royals logo.
And just like you, when you saw that guy with the phone, I remember thinking, this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen.
Meaning, like, if I cared about this, and I was a baseball fan at the time, you could watch Sports Center that night and you'd find out what the score was.
But now think about that, Megan.
We're not that old, right?
We're pretty hip.
We get what's going on.
We're having two babies.
But look what has happened to the world in basically 25 years.
It's unrecognizable.
Yes, I'm thinking now, like same with the internet for sure.
Back then, it was like, what is this crazy thing?
I remember when I was first thinking about getting into journalism, my friend Meredith was giving me a tour at her news station.
She worked for WMAQ, which is the NBC ONO in Chicago.
And she walked me around and we saw, I met some of the reporters.
It was very exciting.
I was still practicing law, but I was thinking about getting out.
And she went out on a date with somebody and she was like, I googled him and I found something.
And I'm like, what does that mean?
What do you mean you, what does that mean?
You Googled him.
You Googled him.
You usually do that after the date.
You know, she explained, I had never heard that term before, like that you could do that.
And this is, you know, I guess that would have been closer to, that was more like 2001 by that.
So 2001, I was still asking that question.
When I joined Fox in 2004, yeah, it was fall of 2004.
We were covering the 60 minutes debacle on the George W. Bush National Guard service.
Remember the thing that brought down Dan Rather, fake news.
And I was doing the hits all day on Saturday and Sunday because I was new and I had the crappy shifts.
And I didn't screw something up, but I missed something that was available to, and Britt Hume wanted it to have been in my report and I had missed it.
And he was like, you got to come to understand the internet.
There's so much great information on here.
Like this is going to be the future.
This is, we're going to be getting so much information off of this off of the internet.
And so this is any kind of, this is Britt Hume, who's actually very tech savvy.
He's always, he loves technology.
So he's kind of one of those older guys who's always ahead.
And he's kind of showing me how to go on the internet and figure out how to get information.
This is like 2004.
Again, it's a little behind my time, but that it wasn't that long ago, Dave.
Dreaming in a Woke Dystopia 00:03:22
And I don't, somehow we managed to make it work.
Somehow the clocks still hit 12 twice a day.
And I still made all my, you know, necessary appointments.
And I have to say, I think I was like, I think my serenity was happier.
Net net.
I think I was a happier person without the devices than I, than I've been since they were introduced.
I think that's very possible.
I think everyone struggles with this to some degree.
And I think everyone at some level is like, man, I wish I could just get off all of these things altogether.
Look at the way misinformation has spread and lies have spread.
And even the fact that, you know, people like us, we can now debunk the nonsense that the mainstream is constantly pushing.
It's like, unless we have solutions for that, all that will lead is for people to be depressed, which actually sort of is why I wrote this book.
It's like we can, we can debunk all this stuff all day long and you can show people, no, they lied about Russia collusion and Brett Kavanaugh wasn't a serial rapist.
And you can do all of these things.
But then at the end, if the conclusion for people is, oh, boy, the machine is lying to me all the time, but I can't do anything about it.
Well, then what did technology actually do?
It exposed something that left us with no answers.
That's why I'm trying to figure out, and I don't have all of them, obviously, but I'm trying to figure out what some of the answers are.
But I suspect that the answer that you're looking for, that I'm looking for, is that you have to incorporate it in your life in a way that makes sense.
And some parents, you know, hand the iPad to the kid at dinner and don't talk to them at all.
And then they scroll TikTok all day.
And now we know that TikTok is causing all problems, you know, all sorts of problems with attention spans and God knows what else TikTok's doing related to the gender stuff that they don't allow in China.
But in our American, TikTok is here and very prominently featured.
But everyone has to make a choice for themselves.
What will your relationship?
That's really what the chapter is about.
What will your relationship with these things be?
It can be very unhealthy.
You can watch porn 10 hours a day if you want.
You can and some people do.
Or you can do research all day long or learn, learn all sorts of incredible things.
I mean, go watch lectures from the greatest thinkers of all time that are on YouTube.
That's wonderful.
But even that, do you want to do that 15 hours a day or do you want to go out and do something?
I mean, we have to just think about how we want to live our lives to the best of our ability.
But often the noise and speed of this thing actually stops us from doing that.
Be mindful.
Be mindful.
One other thing before we go, you've got a chapter called Shake Hands with Your Neighbors, and you talk about the American dream.
That was a term coined, you write, by author James Trislow Adams' 1931 book, The Epic of America.
And I love this quote.
The dream has not been a dream of material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily.
It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders, which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.
And it's just a good reminder, right?
Like grow to the fullest development as a man and a woman, unhampered by the barriers which have slowly been erected.
It's not about money.
It's not about followers.
It's not about likes.
It's about growth.
And as you also make the point elsewhere in the book, certitude being poisonous.
When you're certain of everything, you can never learn anything.
Take in ideas.
Surviving the Woke Era 00:00:49
Stay curious.
Think critically.
It's up to you to figure out what you believe.
Get information.
Strive valiantly, not for money, but for fulfillment, right?
For richness in one's life and one's choices, like family.
All right, I stole the last word, Dave Rubin.
You've got to get the book.
It's called Don't Burn This Country.
We want to support Dave, who's been very brave in offering his views, personal, professional, not just today, but every day.
Surviving and thriving in our woke dystopia.
Thank you for being here, my friend.
Thank you, my friend.
See you soon.
I'll see you in West Nyak.
Yeah, keep rolling 26.
I'll be there.
Don't miss the show tomorrow.
James O'Keefe is here with new info on the way the feds allegedly spied on him.
See you then.
Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no
Export Selection