Dec. 15, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:08:28
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| I've been telling this joke in my stand-up, which I told on... I don't know how dirty we can get. | ||
| You can get as dirty as you want. | ||
| This is the Rubin Report, and I'm still Dave Rubin. | ||
| Before we do anything else today, we have officially launched the Rubin Report community in the Apple App Store, Google Play, and at rubinreport.com. | ||
| But more importantly than that, joining me today is comedian, podcaster, and now star of the new documentary, No Safe Spaces, Which is in theaters as of today, where we're taping this right now. | ||
| Adam Carolla, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you, Dave. | ||
| Good to have you here. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a fan of yours. | ||
| Well, I'm a fan of yours, but you do a lot of this the other way. | ||
| You interview people all the time. | ||
| I do, and I enjoy being interviewed. | ||
| Which do you like more? | ||
| Well, it's like, well, what do you like more, pizza or sushi? | ||
| Well, when you eat a metric ton of pizza every month, you're dying for a California roll. | ||
| So this is your California roll. | ||
| Yeah, it's not that one is better than the other. | ||
| It's like all I do is interview, interview, interview, and I like it when it's swapped. | ||
| I also had this revelation The other day, which is I used to say to Dr. Drew, what you do is easy. | ||
| When we do these shows, we'd be guests on shows and we do college campuses and we do whatever. | ||
| And I realized when I had to be funny, It was a calorie burner, and so what happened was, my comparison or contrast was this. | ||
| I've done a million radio, 25 stations, you're gonna talk to 25 stations over the next three hours, and it's a press junket. | ||
| And when I do one for my book, or a comedy that I'm in, or something of a comedic nature, At the end of the three hours, I'm exhausted because I'm trying to be funny the whole time because it's a comedy book. | ||
| I'm telling them jokes in the book. | ||
| I want them to think I'm funny, so the book is funny. | ||
| You got to keep yourself entertained, too. | ||
| Yes, although I don't care about myself that much, but yes, I do. | ||
| But the last one I did was over a documentary, not No Safe Spaces, but my Ford versus Ferrari doc, which was Shelby American and the 24 Hour War. | ||
| And all I was doing is talking cars the whole time and shop the whole time. | ||
| And I was fresh as a daisy after the three hours, because I realized I was talking about stuff I knew. | ||
| Whereas Dr. Drew gets to talk about medicine. | ||
| If we just talked about carpentry or cars, I wouldn't be exhausted. | ||
| If I'm spinning the comedic plates, it gets tiring. | ||
| What level of energy do you have right now for me to gauge how we should do this interview then? | ||
| I never want to disappoint you or your fans or viewers, so I'm putting out. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, we'll do a little bit on the stuff you know and a little bit on the stuff you pretend to know. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| All up to you. | ||
| But you kind of do do a zillion things because you consider yourself a comic first, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So you're a comic, you're a podcaster, documentaries, reality shows. | ||
| Do you sort of enjoy them all the same, or it's just kind of whatever you're doing? | ||
| I want to do whatever's next. | ||
| I think what makes a bad job for a bad job is monotony, repetition. | ||
| If you have a job where you go, I work at a medium-sized technology company. | ||
| And you go, okay, that sounds okay. | ||
| But if you said to someone, I have a job where I work at a conveyor belt and I just put the heads on dolls and they just keep, it sounds horrible, right? | ||
| Because it's the monotony. | ||
| So if you think about it, even Hosting a late-night show for 30 years is still monotony within a good job, you know. | ||
| And so what most people don't like is when they go, he went to the same postal sorting center in Arlita for 50 years and then he died. | ||
| Everyone feels, goes, well what a boring life, like what a crappy life. | ||
| So for me, Doing a car doc, doing a free speech doc, doing a podcast, writing a book, being in a TV show, or whatever it is. | ||
| It's all just variety, and that's all I wanna do. | ||
| So we're obviously gonna talk a lot about no safe spaces, but your podcast, you were kinda early in on the podcast game, and your podcast, is it basically the biggest sort of talk I don't know. | ||
| He's bigger on iTunes, but we don't get so much of our listeners from iTunes, so I don't know. | ||
| I'll just say he's bigger. | ||
| I don't know. - Looking at the numbers. | ||
| He's bigger on iTunes, but we don't get so much of our listeners from iTunes. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| I'll just say he's bigger. | ||
| I'll be magnanimous. | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| We're the New York Times. | ||
| We're the Guinness Book World Records downloaded, so that much I know. | ||
| That was some years ago. | ||
| Do you remember the moment when you kind of wanted to make that pivot to the digital thing? | ||
| Because I saw a lot of comics get all kinds of crossed up, people that had really promising careers that still wanted to go into TV or traditional radio. | ||
| And then a lot of other guys were like, no, no, there's something else brewing here. | ||
| And then they really started flourishing. | ||
| And I think I kind of went that route, which is what we're doing here. | ||
| I had a terrestrial radio job for many years, maybe over almost 15 years of terrestrial radio | ||
| straight through that ended abruptly. | ||
| I was only interested in keeping a communication line between me and my audience, and not all of my audience, just some of my audience. | ||
| I was always a big fan of talk radio. | ||
| I always appreciated the format. | ||
| I always liked the connection that I felt like the listeners were having with the host. | ||
| I always knew it was deeper because there was a sort of sense of loss that transcended your favorite sitcom going off the air. | ||
| You know, last episode of Friends, last episode of Seinfeld. | ||
| People are like, oh, last episode of Breaking Bad. | ||
| Like, I wish it was still in the air. | ||
| But When somebody like Howard Stern hangs it up, or folks of that ilk, there's going to be a big sense of loss for people. | ||
| And not just entertainment loss, like emotional loss. | ||
| So I had been doing Loveline and doing a morning show with no commercials and a lot of talk, and I felt like a real, like I had an audience and I had a connection. | ||
| And when my show ceased on a Friday, I just said to whoever's listening, | ||
| if you wanna come with me to the digital world, you may find me. | ||
| And I'm assuming most of you aren't because you're in the car and it's on the dial and you're being passive. | ||
| And so if you're not, you're not, that's fine. | ||
| But that doesn't mean you need me. | ||
| It means you don't care that much. | ||
| But for the few that do wanna keep going down this road, I can be found on the internet Come Monday. | ||
| So we won't even miss. | ||
| We won't skip a day. | ||
| I'll stop on a Friday. | ||
| You'll have me waiting for you on Monday. | ||
| I'm not sure what form exactly yet, but you will get me and then we will try to move forward from there. | ||
| And that was really my only concern. | ||
| There was no monetization that I was aware of back then. | ||
| It was just sort of let's keep the connection because it does feel like a death. | ||
| And I know from listening to talk radio as a young person, when somebody finally signs off or goes off the air, I'm like, oh, I like that guy. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And in the old days of radio, you were just gone. | ||
| At that point, you would have just been gone. | ||
| So I have not missed a day since that date, which was, I think, like the 23rd of February, like 2009 or something. | ||
| So you really were early on this and I remember the first time I did your show when I walked into your studio over there I was like holy cow it was before I had my home studio and everything and I was like holy cow this guy actually has a building and staff and it's professional and there's like an area to hang out and coffee and you know all your posters and everything I was like oh you can really do this on your own. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which for me, it was like, whoa, all right, great, there's a path here. | ||
| Well, you're welcome. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| And we'll clean that up in post. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| No post here. | ||
| See, I'm not as professional. | ||
| No post. | ||
| We're supposed to post. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| I had this radio sort of mind. | ||
| I had this thought where you want to do a show. | ||
| You need a producer for you're doing a show. | ||
| You need a sound guy like you can't just completely mom and pop this and expect it. | ||
| Expect to get the product that you want, you know, day in and day out, like you want some production. | ||
| So my earliest thoughts were, I didn't have, like, I'm betting on myself, or I know this is going to be bigger than Uber in five years. | ||
| I didn't have any of that. | ||
| I just had, I know how radio works. | ||
| I don't see why this is different than radio. | ||
| I don't know why we would treat it any different. | ||
| We should have a staff. | ||
| We should have a studio. | ||
| The equipment should be good. | ||
| Don't be scared to spend some money. | ||
| To get money, you're going to have to spend it to make some, like any business. | ||
| And like, furthermore, I was kind of like, if clients are coming in or potential supporters or potential folks are going to buy ad time or whatever it is, they should walk into a building that looks like their money's going somewhere. | ||
| You know, like it's that of like, you don't want your contractor, | ||
| and I know that's a sore subject today, but I mean, your contractor-- | ||
| I'm having a little contracting issue at the moment, it's okay, it's okay. | ||
| Your contractor pulls up in a total rust bucket beater and then wants to charge you a premium, | ||
| you're kind of like, well, look at your truck, So my thing is like, get a nice truck, get a nice bed box, get a lumber rack, like tuck your shirt in, look, look like you're a good contractor and then charge, then go ahead and gouge the elderly. | ||
| You're like the Jordan Peterson of contractors, basically. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| You're telling them to clean their room. | ||
| You must be very impressed with my lighting grid, though. | ||
|
unidentified
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It is. | |
| I mean, come on. | ||
| That is a professional, expensive lighting grid right there. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| It really is nice. | ||
| You'll love this. | ||
| The guy who hung this whole entire grid, which these are huge. | ||
| You can imagine how heavy all these poles are and everything. | ||
| I didn't know who he was. | ||
| I got referred to him by a friend. | ||
| A guy shows up at my door. | ||
| He's about 60 years old. | ||
| I swear on my life. | ||
| His arm's in a sling. | ||
| He's wearing a Tommy Bahama shirt and flip-flops. | ||
| He goes, I'm Joe. | ||
| I'm here to hang the grid. | ||
| And he did this entire thing basically with one arm and flip-flops. | ||
| 15 foot high ceilings with a system of pulleys that he created with one arm. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| On a 15 foot ladder with flip-flops. | ||
| 60 year old guy. | ||
| It was incredible. | ||
| People don't realize... So people work hard, you know? | ||
| Listen, I come from the construction world, so I understand working hard. | ||
| And I also understand the number one killer of men over 60 are ladders. | ||
| Ladders and flip-flops? | ||
| Ladders and flip-flops. | ||
| It's not a good combination. | ||
| All right, let's talk about this movie, No Safe Spaces, because I felt when I watched it a couple weeks ago, I went to the premiere here in L.A., and you were there, and you did this with Dennis Prager, and Jordan Peterson was in it, and Lindsey Shepard was in it, and Bret Weinstein was in it, and Heather Hying was in it. | ||
| Basically, I felt it was like a Rubin Report reunion show. | ||
| I was very pleased, but there was one guy in it. | ||
| That I thought was really incredible and I want to throw to a clip. | ||
| There's a reason that every time one of these professors or TAs whether it's Lindsey Shepard in Canada or Brett Weinstein in Washington, why are they all lefties who then say one | ||
| thing that upsets the left and then they're purged? | ||
| It will come for you. | ||
| I mean, that's if there's someone that's watching this right now that is a hardcore progressive | ||
| that's going, man, I hate Prager and Rubin and this is all nonsense. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| If you have any spark of individualism in you, if you have any, anything about you that's | ||
| interesting or different, they will come to destroy that too. | ||
| That guy is incredible. | ||
| Yeah, he's got it. | ||
| It? | ||
| It! | ||
| I'm sure they're gonna spin that guy off into his own series. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| They continue down this path with Prager and Carolla when they got that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why'd you do this movie? | ||
| Where'd this all come from? | ||
| You know, contrary to popular anything, for me, as we're kind of discussing off the air, I like experiences. | ||
| And the answer is usually yes. | ||
| Like, people say to me, why did you do Dancing with the Stars? | ||
| I'm like, they asked. | ||
| And like, yeah, but what made you want to do? | ||
| And I go, They asked, and I just went, actually with Dancing with the Stars, they asked me if I wanted to do it, and I thought, oh, I'm scared. | ||
| Like, my first impulse was like, it's like, Bobby Hinton wants to see you in the alley after the seventh grade, and you went like, oh, oh my god, I'm scared. | ||
| Like, I'm scared, and then you realize, oh, I have to fight, because I'm like, I'm scared. | ||
| Like, that's what I felt. | ||
| And I like Prager. | ||
| I've had a chance to travel around, play some colleges or do some events with him. | ||
| Prager's a great guy just to kind of kick around with because he's, you know, he has all the wisdom and the knowledge, but in this kind of jovial sort of Uncle Joe from Petticoat Junction kind of fun way, but also is this fountain of wisdom and knowledge and There's really no better guy. | ||
| I mean, I have been lucky in that. | ||
| You know, hanging out with Jimmy Kimmel, hanging out with Dr. Drew, hanging out with Dennis Prager, like just sitting next to him on a long flight or something. | ||
| Like, there's no better guys to just talk or laugh or exchange ideas with. | ||
| All different, but they're like great. | ||
| And I love that. | ||
| Like, I love Sitting with someone and just hearing their ideas and sharing ideas. | ||
| So so when they said we want to do this movie and Dennis Prager's doing it I was just kind of like oh good more time to hang out with Dennis Prager I mean, I like the theme and I and I and I like you know, if you say to me I We want you to be involved with this product or project, and we're not going to tell you what to say. | ||
| You give your opinions on stuff. | ||
| I'm usually in. | ||
| Like, I'm usually in if you go say whatever you want. | ||
| If you say, like, we're doing this project, here's a script, memorize it, regurgitate it. | ||
| I'm usually like, I'm not that interested in that. | ||
| But you're going to sit with Prager. | ||
| We're going to bring up subjects. | ||
| You guys are going to So the movie mostly is about the college campus sort of upheaval that's going on right now. | ||
| Do you remember when you first sort of were aware that there was a problem? | ||
| I was hearing from other comedians that they didn't want to go to college campuses. | ||
| I was, you know, like anyone seeing in the news when people were going to speak at college campuses and unable to speak. | ||
| Live in this world where it's like mostly comedy world. | ||
| So I have this bizarre world where I'm good friends with Sarah Silverman, but I'm also friends with Ben Shapiro, you know, so I would like hear these bits and pieces and people saying to me like, I remember backstage at the comedy store, Sarah said to me, your joke, that joke, that black joke you have, she's like, so funny, too bad you can't do it. | ||
| And I was like, wow, that sucks. | ||
| It's weird that comedians are saying to other comedians, hey, that's a great joke, too bad you can't Do it, you know? | ||
| What do you really make of that, though? | ||
| I'm not a fan of Sarah's. | ||
| I've invited her on the show many times. | ||
| To me, she's sort of, I don't wanna make this about your friend specifically, so you don't have to answer directly to her, but there's a series of comics now that were really politically incorrect back in the day. | ||
| She's been in blackface, right? | ||
| Jimmy Kimmel's been in blackface. | ||
| I don't think either one of them are racist, but by the rules that the left is setting, which they kind of are about those rules, Now she's saying to you, oh, don't make that black joke anymore, and there's a lot of that happening with comics, and I never would have expected that with comedians. | ||
| Well, if you think about comedians, she... | ||
| The thing about comedians, at their core, they want to be loved, right? | ||
| Like, you're standing on stage kind of saying, like, please love me, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, they weren't the most popular kids. | ||
| They weren't jocks in high school. | ||
| Like, they want, if you think about, like, Why are comedians, like, they're very sensitive, which is counterintuitive, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, Jeff Ross, the Roastmaster, is a super sensitive guy. | ||
| And I don't mean that, like, in a weak way, but he's nothing like the Roastmaster. | ||
| He's a sweet, sensitive guy. | ||
| Many comedians are sensitive. | ||
| Many comedians want to be loved. | ||
| Many actors want to be loved. | ||
| That's the profession. | ||
| They're not Taking the job of staff sergeant or foreman. | ||
| They have a job that goes like, please accept me, please love me. | ||
| So when these matters come down the pike, they're, oh, what would get people to love me and accept me and embrace me and send out positive tweets and vibes and stuff. | ||
| So they are sort of wrestling with this duality of I speak my mind, I tell it like it is, | ||
| I take no prisoners, please love me, please love me. | ||
| Yeah, that's a freaking fine line. | ||
| That's a pretty weird fine line. | ||
| My thing has always been, I know I'm not an asshole, | ||
| so I am now free to act like an asshole. | ||
| Like, I know, like my whole thing is like, I know I'm not a bad person, so I can say whatever I want. | ||
| Sort of, if you have, it's basically this. | ||
| If you have friends who you know they love you and you know you love them, then you let the ball busting begin. | ||
| If you have somebody, if you think about it psychologically, like there's that person. | ||
| There's always that one person at work where there's like five of you want to go to lunch and then there's Andy. | ||
| And you don't really want Andy to come with you. | ||
| But if Andy ever catches wind, you have to, like, overcompensate. | ||
| Like, oh, Andy, come on, dude. | ||
| And then he's going, I don't know, I think I'm just going to eat at my desk. | ||
| And everyone goes, it wouldn't be lunch without you, brother. | ||
| And it's like, what they're doing is they all feel weird and bad for not wanting to be there, that they actually go the other way. | ||
| But if you love Andy, And Andy loves you, then you go, we'll get you a burger and bring it back. | ||
| Maybe I'll take a bite out of it. | ||
| And then he laughs, and then you laugh, and then he ends up going. | ||
| But I feel that way about making fun of groups, or races, or individuals, or anything. | ||
| If you have some kind of darkness in your heart, like I always say, You know how you know I'm not racist? | ||
| I make so many racist jokes. | ||
|
unidentified
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If I was racist, I'd be like, I don't make any more racist jokes. | |
| They're on to you. | ||
| Do you think there's some element of it, though, with comics where it's like... | ||
| The ones that have done some of that stuff in the past now, it's like they have to pay penance to make sure that their past doesn't destroy them, where you're saying you're guilt-free because you've done some stuff, right? | ||
| Like, do you ever worry that, like, they're gonna, you know, go back in the man show clips and be, oh, he hates women or any of this kind of stuff, but what they're doing is sort of a more dangerous game because, again, I don't want to make it about those two people specifically, but Like, there's a series of comics now of public people that are calling everyone racists and bigots and all the conservatives are bad guys. | ||
| I mean, you know what I'm talking about, right? | ||
| And it's like, well, you guys used to do that stuff, you know? | ||
| And it just, it strikes me as just, it's just self-preservation. | ||
| I get the emotionally damaged part, but it just strikes me as like, it's just business in a way. | ||
| Well, I mean, look, there, there, it is a business in that, um, It's a business where we don't need manpower. | ||
| Let me put it this way. | ||
| Sorry to interrupt, but let me put it this way. | ||
| So if you showed up, if there was a thing that 20 years ago, you showed up in blackface, I don't think you would get the pass that, say, Kimmel's gotten because Kimmel is a big lefty now. | ||
| He's a Hollywood lefty, so he gets a pass, right? | ||
| Where you're more libertarian, conservative, or just sort of out there so that you, now, you're also self-funded, so that helps, right? | ||
| You're your own boss, so that's good, but you wouldn't get that. | ||
| Get the pass. | ||
| Do you agree with that? | ||
| Here's my take on it. | ||
| I think they go where the getting's good. | ||
| So they're basically feral cats looking for a saucer of milk. | ||
| And if you don't put it out on the porch, they'll kind of keep going. | ||
| People don't really bother me, even though I say horrible things. | ||
| And not horrible things by my definition, but by their definition. | ||
| I do have a picture of me in blackface. | ||
| It's going as Mr. T for Halloween in like 1985. | ||
| I put it out there. | ||
| I'm like, listen, this isn't blackface. | ||
| This is Mr. T. That's not blackface. | ||
| That's a minstrel show. | ||
| This is me dressing like Mr. T because I'm a fan of Mr. T's. | ||
| So this is a... But that's the normal, thoughtful way of dealing with this, of course. | ||
| You weren't doing it to mock the guy. | ||
| You were doing it out of admiration and love. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you would like to take it and contort it and twist it into blackface, which is sort of... | ||
| General, generic, make fun of black people vaudeville stuff. | ||
| This is not that. | ||
| So first things first, I'm not signing off on your definition of what I did. | ||
| I dressed up as Mr. T. Mr. T is black. | ||
| I went with a black face, which is not black face. | ||
| It's me dressing as Mr. T. And furthermore, I'm not apologizing to anybody about it. | ||
| And if you talk to Mr. T, I bet he would be happy that a bunch of kids dressed like him in 1985 and said, I pity the fool over and over again at Halloween parties. | ||
| I used to buy Mr. T cereal. | ||
| That's far worse than doing blackface of Mr. T. You consumed Mr. T. | ||
| I think with me, there's no job to remove me from, per se. | ||
| And then also, I don't apologize. | ||
| And I also, the other thing is, is I don't let, or I attempt not to let people | ||
| create this narrative and create this theme, which is, you know, there's a picture of you with black, | ||
| it wasn't paint, I actually took, I think I took a toilet paper roll and burnt the end of it | ||
| and then like smeared the soot on my face. | ||
| But there's a picture of you in. | ||
| In blackface. | ||
| And I go, no, no, there's a picture of me dressed like Mr. T. And they go, in blackface. | ||
| I go, not blackface. | ||
| That's a different genre. | ||
| This is Mr. T. That's from the 40s or the 30s. | ||
| This is from the 80s. | ||
| But you still, I go, I'm dressed like Mr. T. | ||
| It's an homage to the man. | ||
| And what do you want me to do about it? | ||
| I'll put every picture up on the internet. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are you kind of fascinated how it hits like every comic, no matter how sort of vanilla they are? | ||
| There's a moment, it's in the movie, about Seinfeld telling this story about doing a college gig and he does a joke about a gay, what is it, a gay British king or something? | ||
| Or a French king with a loose hand, and he said he did this joke, and the kids basically, this is like five years ago, the kids basically groaned. | ||
| And it's like Seinfeld, who, I love Jerry's stand-up, the show's the greatest sitcom ever, it's like, I don't know any of his political beliefs on anything. | ||
| He has so guarded what his actual political beliefs are, and he does this silly joke about a French king's hand, and that's even too politically incorrect for these students. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's funny. | ||
| I've now kind of figured it's kind of interesting because I do know a lot of these comedians and We've we all know our actors or Hollywood community. | ||
| I've now kind of figured it out where he went like, well, I know Sarah Silverman and Mark Ruffalo and Alyssa Milano. | ||
| I know their politics. | ||
| But I don't know Jerry Seinfeld's politics or I don't know Jay Leno's politics. | ||
| I go. | ||
| My new world order is when you don't know, go ahead and check the Republican box, because my new theory I started thinking about, and I have some insider trading information here, I'm like, how come everyone else is out there blasting it out from the highest mountain? | ||
| I mean, when you're on the left and You're not playing it close to the vest like a Murano. | ||
| It's a Dennis Prager reference, but the Jews of Spain who are kind of like, don't let anyone fight. | ||
| If you are If you are back in Bernie or Elizabeth Warren or whatever and you're in the Hollywood community, you have a bullhorn and you're on a mountaintop. | ||
| So if you really just kind of do the reverse math, like who are the people whose politics you're completely unaware of and you've never heard them speak a word about it, you must go Hmm, how come I've never heard, how come I've never seen him at a rally, a women's rally or marching on or sending a tweet out about, and you go, I'm gonna do a reverse math on that. | ||
| So you're saying Seinfeld ain't voting for Bernie? | ||
| I think the guys who you hear nothing about have a leaning that's probably a little less Bernie and probably a little more Trump. | ||
| Do you miss the days when not everything was so political? | ||
| Because that also is what this movie's about, in that politics has now leaked into every part of society all the time. | ||
| So it's like you just mentioned Leno, and it's like back in the day, Like, I never really liked Leno because I didn't know what he thought about anything, and in a weird way, I miss that now. | ||
| Like, I don't watch any of those late night shows, but every night, when you see clips on Twitter of, I can't even think of who's the host, who's the... It's Fallon. | ||
| Fallon, and who's the other one? | ||
| The NBC one. | ||
| Colbert. | ||
| The other guy, Seth Meyers. | ||
| It's like they're just railing on Trump every, like it's the same thing every night, over and over, where it's so political all the time, and it's made me sort of miss the day that Leno would just go up there, and it was just like, he was just doing this thing that was sort of for everybody. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I think there's an element of, sort of a saturation point, like you did, One Leno back in the day to dig into more substantive issues or reveal a little more of himself and all that. | ||
| And Jay, who I know really well, has always realized that this is a marathon and it's not a sprint. | ||
| I respect that now. | ||
| I regret it. | ||
| I was hard on him for years when I was doing stand up and I regret it actually. | ||
| And I think he's kind of realized that no good could come from him. | ||
| I also believe I believe there's some old school comedians who go, you're not supposed to know me. | ||
| You're supposed to know my jokes. | ||
| Like, I'm going to let my jokes do my talking. | ||
| I don't want the distraction of you knowing I'm Republican or Democrat or gay or straight or anything. | ||
| I don't want anything bleeding into this. | ||
| these jokes I'm going to lay over you. | ||
| But also, when people know, you know, when you take a stand as a Patriots fan | ||
| and you let the world know you're the number one Patriots fan, | ||
| The Patriots are capable of then spending a decade losing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, you know, like, why declare a major when the next person could get voted in and this thing could swing, like, the other direction? | ||
| It seems like you're putting your career needlessly in jeopardy. | ||
| Yeah, it's kind of crazy for a comic, that truth-telling thing and the like thing. | ||
| They can often just be at odds with each other. | ||
| Yeah, I do think that many people, many comedians as you know, just have a different approach to comedy and also there's an element of You live in Hollywood. | ||
| You have a job. | ||
| I've been telling this joke in my stand-up, which I told on... I don't know how dirty we can get. | ||
| You can get as dirty as you want. | ||
| I told this joke when we were doing the... | ||
| You want to get in blackface for this one? | ||
| We're doing a roast. | ||
| We've got a guy with some charcoal back here. | ||
| We're doing a roast on Comedy Central for Alec Baldwin. | ||
| And it's a joke that Larry David was sitting in the front row and he literally, on a commercial break, came over and went, that's the funniest thing I've ever heard. | ||
| And I was like, the greatest moment of my life, because I love it. | ||
| That's pretty, pretty, pretty good. | ||
| And I was like, that joke, I love it. | ||
| And it's a very Larry David joke, and it's also totally politically incorrect, but it is here to kind of illustrate that when I was a carpenter, or guys who do fabrication work and can shape metal into any shape, or a guy in flip-flops with one arm who can hang a lighting grid, it doesn't really matter what his politics are. | ||
| We can't run him out. | ||
| We can't go, no more lighting grid work for you. | ||
| Or, hey man, if you're a journeyman carpenter, like if you're a good carpenter, you can't be drummed out. | ||
| There's like too many people who need you. | ||
| If you're an actor, look, Matt Lauer made $30 million a year. | ||
| Now Matt Lauer makes nothing. | ||
| Does anyone miss Matt Lauer? | ||
| We don't need Matt Lauer. | ||
| We didn't need Billy Bush. | ||
| We can just knock you out and go with somebody else. | ||
| We don't need you. | ||
| That's kind of scary. | ||
| You live in a town where the journeyman carpenter don't have to they don't have to worry what they talk about but an actor you could get tossed out of this club and the joke was I had Alec Baldwin sitting over here and I had Robert De Niro sitting next to him and I said two of the finest actors in America what amazing Craft and ability. | ||
| Unbelievable ability. | ||
| Look at the two of you. | ||
| I mean, maybe the two greatest ever. | ||
| So much respect for you. | ||
| But actually hearing after hearing about the whole Harvey Weinstein situation and hearing a lot of those stories, I don't know if I have such high respect for the craft of acting anymore. | ||
| I mean, what other job works this way? | ||
| You want to be a commercial airline pilot? | ||
| Yeah, blow that fat Jew. | ||
| I'll have you up in the air this afternoon. | ||
| You want to be a dental hygienist? | ||
| Blow the fat Jew. | ||
| We'll start hiking tomorrow. | ||
| I was making the joke that maybe acting is not as hard. | ||
| I think that proves your point. | ||
| Actors are in a precarious situation. | ||
| Now, Dave Chappelle isn't. | ||
| Dave Chappelle's a juryman carpenter. | ||
| But Matt Lauer reads a teleprompter. | ||
| And many actors could be replaced by, whenever they do those things, you know who was going to play the original Indiana Jones? | ||
| And you go, oh, it was going to be the original 007 was going to be? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| You realize they live in a world where someone else could just take their job the next day and we're not really going to miss them. | ||
| So you got to kind of follow the party line. | ||
| It's interesting that you bring up Chappelle because you're basically saying a guy like him who has just relentlessly, you know, fought the system sort of, his bravery is what now protects him. | ||
| Which that kind of is a theme throughout the movie too, that all of the people that I mentioned earlier from Brett and Lindsay and Jordan, who else is in there? | ||
| I mean, everybody's in there. | ||
| There's Van Jones. | ||
| Van Jones, yeah. | ||
| And there's Dershowitz. | ||
| Well, that's interesting, because you guys make a point, and this is the part that I'm in, you make a point of saying that there are a couple liberals left. | ||
| Did you feel like that was a point you really had to hit? | ||
| Otherwise, it would just be seen as, you know, a couple good liberals left, as opposed to just saying, well, then we're just making a conservative movie here, or something like that. | ||
| Well, I think, You know, I think there's kind of a catch-22 where someone will say, and there's obviously been this critique, you're only highlighting right-leaning speakers or conservative speakers who are being shouted off the college campuses. | ||
| You're only highlighting the Ben Shapiros and the Ann Coulters. | ||
| And the answer is, Because they don't shout out left-leaning ones. | ||
| So this is a weird thing you're asking us to do. | ||
| Like, be more even-handed. | ||
| Well, if Rachel Maddow went to Berkeley, there wouldn't be fires in the parking lot, so... Yeah, you mean it wouldn't cost... Was it $300,000 or $600,000 to secure that Shapiro event? | ||
| I think it was $600,000. | ||
| I think it was $600,000. | ||
| This thing of like, we only highlight this. | ||
| Well, it's like, those are the only people that get protested, so if you're gonna highlight protests, then unfortunately, it's only gonna be from that side. | ||
| We wanted to, I mean, we've had conversations. | ||
| We don't want this to come across as some sort of right-wing tutorial. | ||
| Yeah, and it doesn't. | ||
| The Van Joneses and the Cornel West and the Alan Dershowitz-i and many people from all sides and everything in between to speak about this subject. | ||
| And that was intentional. | ||
| You link a lot of this stuff that's happening on colleges in the movie, you link it to sort of how we've raised kids now. | ||
| So you want to kick the millennials while they're down? | ||
| I do. | ||
| As I travel through this land, I think this self-esteem movement is really the genesis of this. | ||
| Because I started thinking when I was 19, I didn't have any self-esteem. | ||
| My thing was like, I'm not gonna tell an adult what to do. | ||
| Like I would never dream. | ||
| If I was walking down the street and I was like 16 and I'd passed a 45-year-old guy and he just went, hey, stop. | ||
| And I'd went, well, I need to go, give me 20 pushups. | ||
| I would have been like, okay, with diamond hands or we'll kind of do a widespread. | ||
| Like I would have just done it because he's a dude and he's older than me and he told me to do something. | ||
| Like that's how I was wired. | ||
| So I started thinking like, Well, if I were 19 and I was on a college campus, and I was on a construction site, but if I was on a college campus, and by the way, when I was on a construction site, I had a foreman go, he said, go to my truck, get my four foot level out of my gun rack. | ||
| He had like a four foot level hanging on his gun rack. | ||
| And I said, okay. | ||
| And I started walking the truck and he goes, hey, run. | ||
| And I started running because he told me to run because he's older than I am. | ||
| You also had a gun rack, so it was probably a wise move by you. | ||
| Yeah, where's the gun? | ||
| Run! | ||
| There probably wasn't all levels in there. | ||
| Run, Serpentine! | ||
| So I started thinking, if I was 19 and I was on a College campus and they announced that some 50-year-old with a bunch of degrees was coming to speak. | ||
| I would never go like not over my dead body. | ||
| I just be like, okay. | ||
| All right, and then someone would go Well, Adam, he's going to talk about stuff you disagree with, and I'd go, well, he's 50 and has all the degrees, so I guess I'm probably wrong. | ||
| And then someone would go, does he have the right to speak here? | ||
| And I'd go, of course, it's not my campus. | ||
| I'm basically, this is a four-year motel I'm living at. | ||
| I don't own the building. | ||
| Like, who knows? | ||
| It's not for me to... And then if they went, we're going to go rally and create a human blockade. | ||
| I'd be like, why? | ||
| Just don't go to the show. | ||
| Well, I don't get it, and I realize... Sort of like a sane, functioning person, that's what you're saying. | ||
| You would have acted like a 19-year-old should be. | ||
| Well, how high does your self-esteem have to be to go, not on my watch, no way is... | ||
| Is David Rubin or Jordan, I'm sorry, Jordan Rubin or Ben Shapiro, sorry. | ||
| You're combining all these people. | ||
| I combined them into one. | ||
| One horrible transformer. | ||
| Yeah, that's going to be protested. | ||
| Why would that be my job? | ||
| Who am I to do that? | ||
| So if you think about what that takes, that takes a life of grooming. | ||
| That takes a life of don't let anyone tell you what to do. | ||
| You tell them what to do. | ||
| Like, you're special. | ||
| Your opinion matters. | ||
| Don't let anybody, you know... So the self-esteem movement, I believe, is super dangerous. | ||
| How are you going to put World War II, get in a Higgins landing craft and go hit Normandy? | ||
| 19-year-olds with super high self-esteem? | ||
| You think they're getting in that thing? | ||
| You think they're going to rush a German pillbox? | ||
| Hell no! | ||
| No. | ||
| So this thing that we thought was good, like, hey, what if everyone just felt really good about themselves? | ||
| That's good if you earn it. | ||
| If you just rub it on them, that ain't earning it, and that's gonna lead to trouble. | ||
| So if we go a little meta on that, do you think that's actually by design? | ||
| Do you think that is just like, it's sort of just kinda like liberals that wanted everybody to feel good and it's just kinda nice? | ||
| Or do you think it was actually by design by some bad actors that pushed this stuff out there to weaken all of the things that the movie's about? | ||
| I think it can be traced back to a gentleman who's out of Los Angeles who had an idea which is like, it was, and I'll paraphrase, but it's like some of these inner-city kids and some of these low-income kids are single parent kids and stuff they have low self-esteem like they don't their dad abandoned them like they don't feel good about themselves and if they felt good about themselves they would start excelling in school and get out of gangs and not be involved with crime so how | ||
| how do we get them to feel good about themselves? | ||
| And it's like, well, we can't get their dad back in the house | ||
| and we can't give them an A in calculus when they're failing calculus. | ||
| We're just gonna start telling them how good they are and they'll feel good about themselves. | ||
| And what ended up happening is it turns out like criminals have high self-esteem. | ||
| Like they didn't know it's a unintended circumstance. | ||
| Like, I have a good heart. | ||
| You know, it's basically all that stuff of like, I have a good heart. | ||
| Let's build big housing projects and let people live in free in those and we'll give them food and we'll level it. | ||
| It's like, yeah, you're running out. | ||
| It all sounds good. | ||
| You have a great heart. | ||
| You've now ruined a group of people. | ||
| That's how you ruin people. | ||
| You tell them, you give them things without earning it. | ||
| You give them food without earning it, you give them housing without earning it, or you give them self-esteem without earning it. | ||
| You don't earn it. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| It morphs into something bad and then comes back in a weird kind of vitriolic way. | ||
| So, one of the things I kept thinking during the movie is, over the last couple years, as I've had all these people on, I mean, so many of the people in the movie have been in here to discuss the very things they're bringing up in the movie, I've often thought, man, am I overblowing this? | ||
| Like, am I just exaggerating, or am I just finding these random people? | ||
| Lindsay Shepard, this TA at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, which I had never heard of before. | ||
| Am I overblowing this? | ||
| And then, The answer always turns out to be no, because the next week there's somebody else that it happens to, and the next week there's somebody else, and the rest of it. | ||
| But were you ever worried about that, that as you make this, that it makes it feel like it's bigger than it is? | ||
| Or do you really believe that it is this big? | ||
| I think when you endeavor to do any kind of storytelling, there's a balance between Making it compelling, and I know this, I'll give you an example, and then I'll circle back. | ||
| I've made other documentaries about subjects that have nothing to do with this, and I made a documentary about Paul Newman and his racing life, and it's called Winning the Racing Life of Paul Newman, and your audience would enjoy it. | ||
| His partner, his teammate, and his best friend and teammate died in a race in Florida. | ||
| Paul was racing. | ||
| He was racing. | ||
| Fitzy was his name. | ||
| He died in the race. | ||
| He died, they think, because he had a heart attack when he was driving the car and just never slowed down for like turn three and just plowed in the wall and died. | ||
| And when you're making the film, I'm saying it's more dramatic if he just never hit the brakes on turn three and got in this horrific accident and died. | ||
| Now the truth is he had a heart attack, probably, and died and then hit the wall. | ||
| Died for sure or broke his neck or whatever it is and as a filmmaker | ||
| I'm like I don't want to lie, but I'd like to make this dramatic | ||
| So I took out the part where he probably was dead from the heart attack and just said he went down the straightaway | ||
| He never break for turn three. He died when he hit the wall, you know | ||
| And so there's this kind of thing where it's like don't lie But you're also making a film like you're trying to | ||
| entertain I think what's going on on college campuses is bad. | ||
| I have 13 year old twins. | ||
| I have reservations about sending them to college, and I do hear the stories, and I don't like the stories. | ||
| But By the same token, you're trying to make a film that holds people's interest, and the music swells, and you take a little artistic license, and it's a dramatic shot of the smoke burning in slow motion and stuff. | ||
| And yeah, so of course there's an element of like, we are going to massage it, you know, like they do in, you know, in theatrical filmmaking as well. | ||
| It's speaking to the same part of your brain. | ||
| Like you want people to sit up, pay attention, and and what have you, and it's just a part of filmmaking. | ||
| So the answer is sort of yes and yes. | ||
| I do think it's bad, but also, you take some artistic license and ratchet it up. | ||
| Right, and you guys actually hit all that, because there are moments where you're, it's like, my heart was kind of tight, like, oh man, this is horrible, and then a minute later, you're laughing. | ||
| So it does kind of feel that. | ||
| When you see people, like, I thought there's an extensive proportion on what happened to Brett Weinstein and his wife Heather at Evergreen, And as I was watching it, and I know Brett very well now and we're good friends, I was kind of thinking like, wow, how did he not see this coming? | ||
| Like as a lefty professor at a lefty school. | ||
| Did you think that at all about how did these guys not see that this thing was just brewing all this time? | ||
| Like until the day before the kids are showing up with the baseball bats on campus? | ||
| Well, I think there's a, I think there's a disconnect. | ||
| I've had this thought all the time. | ||
| Like, when I, it's like, you're anti, you know, this is a big thing with like Dr. Drew. | ||
| It's like, there's a whole anti-smoking coalition out, coalition. | ||
| So there's an anti-smoking coalition. | ||
| Like, we hate smoke, secondhand smoke, thirdhand smoke. | ||
| There's no place for smoke. | ||
| And then somebody goes, Oh, OK. | ||
| We now have vaping. | ||
| It's just vapor with nicotine, which is sort of inert vapor. | ||
| That's like basically saying caffeine and water. | ||
| So good. | ||
| We're happy now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They go now. | ||
| Now it's outlaw that you go. | ||
| Well, hold on. | ||
| I thought you didn't like smoke. | ||
| Yeah, no, we don't. | ||
| We don't want. | ||
| And you start to kind of realize Some groups, like PETA's that way, the anti-smoking people are that way. | ||
| There's a right version of that. | ||
| When I did Loveline, it was like Christian Coalition, you know, they're against abortions. | ||
| Oh, okay, good. | ||
| Now they have the morning after pill and they go, Yeah, we're against that too. | ||
| And you go, wait a minute, that's going to stop abortions. | ||
| And they go, yeah, we're not down with that pill. | ||
| And you're like, wait, you hate abortions? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There's a pill you can take that stops the insemination. | ||
| It's like. | ||
| Yeah, we don't want that. | ||
| Okay, so now I'm starting to think you just want control. | ||
| My favorite one of those is Peter Thiel, who's the openly gay billionaire. | ||
| Out Magazine wrote a piece on him that he's not gay, actually, because he's conservative. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And that would trump his gayness. | ||
| Right, I love it when they do it with gay or black or anything. | ||
| Candace Owens should not black anymore, because I love it. | ||
| I love the hypocrisy. | ||
| I realize that the group, the sort of progressive movement, if you really just take those two words, progress and movement, it's like this is saying we don't stop, but we keep rolling. | ||
| And so I think like Weinstein, guys like that go. | ||
| They take things at face value. | ||
| Like, okay, they want a day without black students. | ||
| They say, okay, I get it. | ||
| That's a tradition. | ||
| Like, I see what they want. | ||
| They want this thing. | ||
| And it's like, no, they don't want this thing. | ||
| They want to keep going and they want to keep telling you what to do. | ||
| And once they get what they want for a while, it's never, no one's ever appeased. | ||
| We don't go, OK, we could move on, guys. | ||
| Time to move on. | ||
| No, they go, who's next? | ||
| What's next? | ||
| What can we do? | ||
| So this day without a black student thing. | ||
| The worst thing you can do is just go, okay, good for you, we applaud that. | ||
| They go, oh, okay, and then they go, wait a minute, there's nothing to push against. | ||
| The man has basically endorsed this. | ||
| Right, and Brett, just for the record, he did endorse it for a decade there. | ||
| He said, if you guys don't wanna come on this day to protest what you view as historic discrimination, go ahead and do it. | ||
| But then you get bored with that because now you're not telling someone what to do, so now you ratchet it up. | ||
| And then Brett Weinstein is like, he doesn't get it because he's seeing it through the eyes of a sane person. | ||
| Like, basically. | ||
| That's all of our fatal flaws in this, huh? | ||
| Well, the reason the Twin Towers are on the ground is because we did a thing of like, wait a minute. | ||
| Who would fly an airplane into a building if they were in the airplane? | ||
| Like, you would parachute out of the airplane? | ||
| Like, no, no, I'll be the pilot. | ||
| I'll be the first to hit the building. | ||
| And we go, well, no one would do that. | ||
| Like, I could see him putting a truck bomb and running, but they're not going to Fly it in while all of them are in the airplane? | ||
| See, we don't think that way. | ||
| That doesn't make sense to us. | ||
| You have to realize there's a lot of people out there that think in a way that is totally different than the way you think. | ||
| And by the way, when you think, you think it's a universal thing. | ||
| When you say to me, some people don't like lasagna. | ||
| I go, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| That can't be possible. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| Everyone loves lasagna. | ||
| Some people don't care for it. | ||
| I go, no way. | ||
| Everyone loves lasagna. | ||
| So they don't think like I think. | ||
| And they don't like lasagna. | ||
| And I can't picture that. | ||
| But you don't fly a plane into their home. | ||
| That's what you're telling me. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| You don't fly a commercial airliner into their home. | ||
| So I'm saying, I think guys like Brett Weinstein is saying, Well, I think logically, and I love everyone, and I'm open-minded, and I'm liberal, so no one could go after me. | ||
| After all, I teach at this school, and people know my reputation, and I have a little bit of a ju-fro, and I'm soft-spoken, and I ride my schwin in every day. | ||
| Like, come on! | ||
| This group's not going after me! | ||
| I'm them, man! | ||
| So he's thinking and what he's not realizing is that group can go after anybody because they're never satiated. | ||
| There's no finish line. | ||
| They're just going to keep going. | ||
| Has that sold you on conservatism more so now? | ||
| Because I see that as, you know, I still describe myself as liberal, but I see this as like the real sort of almost unsolvable problem of liberalism. | ||
| That liberals always want to be open and decent and understanding and all of that. | ||
| But then when a movement that is so totalitarian and crazed and wants to progress no matter what it's progressing to, liberals don't seem to have a good defense against that, where conservatives seem to actually have it better. | ||
| Well, I feel like I've never felt like, I've never felt it practical to Pick a team and then pick all that is that team and so I'll answer it in a roundabout way. | ||
| I love cars. | ||
| I have a bunch of race cars. | ||
| I drive a bunch of race cars. | ||
| I have a lot of different cars, because I love cars. | ||
| And sometimes I'll talk to guys, and they'll go, oh, they'll go, you're a car guy? | ||
| I'm a car guy. | ||
| You love cars? | ||
| I love cars. | ||
| And then I go, what kind of cars do you like? | ||
| And they go, I'm a Mopar guy. | ||
| Everything I got's a Dodge. | ||
| Everything's got a Hemi in it. | ||
| And I'm like, well, you're a car guy, but you just have this one car. | ||
| It's kind of like going, I love the ladies, but only Puerto Ricans. | ||
| Hop on a blonde and a black chick and a redhead. | ||
| Like, if you really love women, what's wrong with all of, you know, all of them, you know? | ||
| Like, that's my thing. | ||
| It's like, if you really love women, go out with a whole bunch of different women. | ||
| And I feel- Now I finally believe that you're not racist. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| You're willing to bang every type of woman. | ||
| I'm willing to bang every type of woman. | ||
| And I sort of treat my world politically, kind of like I'm just pushing a cart through a Trader Joe's. | ||
| Like, I'm not really into the Nilla cookies over there, but I do like that jerky, you know? | ||
| And at some point, the cart will start to take shape, I guess, and you'll go, oh, this guy likes his meat, or he likes his protein, or this person likes their carbohydrates or whatever. | ||
| And so for me, it's like conservative. | ||
| Well, I'm not religious. | ||
| I'm basically an atheist. | ||
| And I'm not a gun person, but I'm not anti-gun. | ||
| I'm sort of pragmatic gun. | ||
| I've sort of realized, like, when you read op-eds in the Los Angeles Times about, should we arm the teachers? | ||
| What difference would it make if one of those teachers at Columbine had a gun? | ||
| What difference? | ||
| And then they go, and they go, Three kids dead. | ||
| Eight kids dead. | ||
| Fifteen. | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
| I'm like, what's the difference? | ||
| The difference is three versus fifteen. | ||
| It's all like, I think it'd make a pretty big difference to the fourth kid who would have died if the teacher wasn't armed. | ||
| So it's like I'm not buying into this cockamamie doctrine of what difference would it make. | ||
| But my thing is like, I'm not religious and I don't have real strong like sort of conservative, whatever, upbringing or values, but I do understand that intact families and a focus on education and having a patriotic, the patriotic part just sort of loving your country, not to the point where, you know, you've covered yourself in the American flag and driving a pickup truck, but I mean like, | ||
| Okay, we've made mistakes, but you know what? | ||
| Is there anywhere else you'd rather live? | ||
| That leads to a sort of happiness. | ||
| Pot, legal, gay marriage, legal, whatever else. | ||
| Do your own thing. | ||
| I'm very interested in, if I'm not hurting you, I should be able to do what I want to do. | ||
| But the problem with the left is the left is saying, let us tell you what to do. | ||
| And if you say something that we have not vetted or approved, we shall remove you from | ||
| your job. | ||
| And that kind of McCarthyism of no one can work because you had a transgression from | ||
| 11 years ago in a yearbook or whatever it is, I don't like. | ||
| And the part that I really don't like. | ||
| And the part that's feeling very sort of like communist China to me is like the forced apologies. | ||
| That's the scary part to me. | ||
| Like the announcer that is talking about the Baltimore Ravens quarterback, and it's like, well, his skin tone is dark. | ||
| The ball is dark. | ||
| The jersey's dark. | ||
| He has an advantage. | ||
| And then at some point, he has to go, I regret saying and realizing my hurtful terms. | ||
| It's like, you don't regret it. | ||
| Those weren't hurtful terms. | ||
| We want you to analyze football. | ||
| And you've actually brought up a point I've never thought of, which is it takes a millisecond for the Outside linebacker who's coming around the corner You're trying to get him to bite on this play fake. | ||
| You're trying and just as if I was a if I was an African-American boxer and I had brown gloves and I kept them close to my chest and you had red gloves I'd have a little advantage I could see I could see the red gloves coming a millisecond off of versus the brown gloves off of the brown skin color. | ||
| And this guy was basically making the point that the defensive end and then he went on to say how great the quarterback was. | ||
| So he's making a point. | ||
| It's an interesting point and he's right. | ||
| The guy does a great job of staying with it, the ball's hard to spot, the outside linebacker bites on it, and he goes around him for a touchdown, and he has to pretend to apologize because he's going to get fired. | ||
| And when I hear, to me the heartbreaking part of the whole thing is the apology. | ||
| The outrage culture and all that, it's the person with the prepared statement begging For you not to relieve them of their job. | ||
| That's the part that feels like Twilight Zone, wish you out to the cornfield. | ||
| Like, hey, hey, it's a good thing. | ||
| It's a real good thing, boy. | ||
| It's a good thing you did. | ||
| Like, everyone's scared to get wished out into the cornfield and now they're having to apologize. | ||
| And there's so many crazy examples of that. | ||
| Remember when Mark Duplass, who's a Hollywood producer and actor, who's been on my show, we're friendly, and he sent out that tweet that he basically said Ben Shapiro's not the devil, and then he had to apologize. | ||
| It's like, he didn't endorse the guy, he didn't say he agreed with him, it was in effect like he's not a horrible person. | ||
| And then, you know, mob comes. | ||
| It's like Orwellian, but it's also McCarthyism. | ||
| Look, I know the Duplass brothers. | ||
| They're good guys. | ||
| Yeah, he's a totally good guy. | ||
| They wanna work. | ||
| Now, the only way to stomp this out is for everyone to tell everyone to fuck off and not do it, but Mark Duplass does shows with HBO. | ||
| They're very woke. | ||
| This may, Not hurt him, but are you taking that chance? | ||
| I mean, you've got a production company, wife and kids, employees. | ||
| You've got a business, you know what I mean? | ||
| And what he's doing is he's going, me saying Ben Shapiro's a good guy, even if I preface it with, you may not agree politically. | ||
| And then getting a bunch of blowback. | ||
| Maybe HBO does something about that. | ||
| Maybe they don't. | ||
| I have 25 employees. | ||
| Do I want to take that chance? | ||
| I don't want to take that chance. | ||
| So I'm just going to issue this cowardly statement, basically distancing myself from a guy who helped me out. | ||
| I mean, it's completely disingenuous. | ||
| It's cowardly. | ||
| But hey, I got a job. | ||
| I got to keep my job. | ||
| This is what's great. | ||
| So now you and I don't have that. | ||
| Maybe it's not helping your eye. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| But if you want to work for HBO, you want to sell product to HBO, you better be careful what you say, who you associate with, and who you do business with, or who you praise. | ||
| All right, so last thing, so we can wrap up with the movie. | ||
| You talked about that Prager guy before. | ||
| There's a sort of fun moment in the movie where you talk about how different you guys are. | ||
| Just everything about you, you just said you're basically an atheist, he's a at least somewhat religious Jew, your upbringings are completely different. | ||
| Everything about you guys is completely different, yet you guys came together on this thing, and you were touring in colleges before this and all that. | ||
| Can you just talk about that a little bit? | ||
| Well, you know, I think we do a thing which is... You see how I brought it around so that you could promote the movie? | ||
| I do love that. | ||
| Wasn't that professional? | ||
| That's an interviewer. | ||
| No, Save Spaces, in theaters.com. | ||
| You can also go to Chassis, C-H-A-S-S-Y.com, and see all these motor racing docs I've made, if you like that. | ||
| I don't like this world, I was just talking about this yesterday, where it's like we need diversity and people of color and the fire department should represent the community that it serves and it's all that. | ||
| Also, what, your skin color's the same color. | ||
| Like, what really is that you're the same? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, Dennis and I have common sense. | ||
| He has buckets of common sense. | ||
| I'm very rooted in common sense. | ||
| We have nothing in common, but we do have common sense, and that trumps everything. | ||
| And we have somehow constructed a world where you go, your mom's name is Dorothy? | ||
| My mom's name is Dorothy. | ||
| Oh, wow, now we really have a bond. | ||
| You don't have a bond. | ||
| And you go, you're from Valley Village? | ||
| I grew up in Valley Village. | ||
| So what? | ||
| You don't have a bond? | ||
| Your skin color, that doesn't give you a bond. | ||
| Your height, you love, oh, the Rams are your team? | ||
| I love the Rams. | ||
| What the hell kind of bond is that? | ||
| The real diversity is having different thoughts and different ideas, and the real kinship is sharing common sense and ideas and thinking alike. | ||
| Obviously, nobody could get further away from my background than Dennis Prager. | ||
| He is You know, devout Jew, speaks five languages, traveled to every continent in the world, in most every country, is a scholar, is everything. | ||
| I'm from, you know, four and a half miles that way. | ||
| I grew up riding BMX bikes and working on construction sites, working as a boxing coach, took groundlings classes. | ||
| There's no education, no understanding of symphonic scores, no anything except for we have a total kinship because we have this sort of common sense clarity. | ||
| I think I would count you in that group as well. | ||
| I'm sure you and I are extremely different in our upbringing and our lifestyle, but I feel a definite clarity and a kinship with you because of that common sense clarity. | ||
| And I think people make a mistake where they go, oh, well, you're just a Republican or you're just a this or you're just a that. | ||
| No. | ||
| To me, people think clearly or they don't think clearly. | ||
| It doesn't mean they're right 100% of the time. | ||
| It's that they want to get to it. | ||
| And, you know, famously, When you were sitting down with Larry Elder all those years ago and they were talking about race. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| And he brought up a bunch of stats and facts and stuff and you said, you didn't say cut. | ||
| You didn't say I agree to disagree. | ||
| You didn't do that thing where you go like, oh yeah, I'm going to pull the real stats and I'll get back to you Monday and you'll apologize to me and then never get back to him, whatever. | ||
| You stopped and went, well, maybe there's something I can learn from this person and I will be, I will be open to it. | ||
| And I was like, now I respect you. | ||
| I respect you. | ||
| And so in this conversation where Larry Elder is shooting out all these facts and figures, I find myself respecting you. | ||
| I'm saying because he's open to this, he's not going, oh, I was 1000% wrong. | ||
| He's going, I will leave myself in this Receptive position. | ||
| And if I hear things that make sense, I'll think about it. | ||
| I'm not going to ward off of everything because you're on that side and I'm on this side. | ||
| You know, it's funny. | ||
| I just thought that's what you're supposed to do as a human. | ||
| Like it's not rocket science. | ||
| I just thought, oh, someone's telling me something. | ||
| This stuff sounds pretty good. | ||
| I'll check it out. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| I always love when Prager says, I don't need agreement. | ||
| I just need clarity. | ||
| Like we just, I need to understand what you're saying and you need to understand what I'm saying. | ||
| And usually if you're both intelligent people, you'll arrive. | ||
| And if there's not a bunch of underlying issues about, you know, being in with the school teachers unions or something like that, you'll just all arrive kind of at the same place. | ||
| But, That's, yes, that's how you're supposed to be. | ||
| That's how you should be. | ||
| It's called being intellectually honest. | ||
| And I wish more people on the right and the left were that way. | ||
| And it would behoove you to be that way, because that's the way you grow and change and evolve. | ||
| All right, Carolla, I've never done this in the history of the Rubin Report, ever, but I'm gonna let you close the show because you're a pro. | ||
| I want you to look at that camera right there, the one that's pointed towards you. | ||
| Tell them about No Safe Spaces, where they can go. | ||
| It's in theaters now, the whole spiel. | ||
| I'm gonna be quiet for the rest. | ||
| Take it away. | ||
| It's in 200 theaters as we speak. | ||
| It's nationwide as we speak. | ||
| It's 99% on Rotten Tomatoes with the people. | ||
| Of course, the critics. | ||
| Some haters in there. | ||
| That's a mark of a good thing, though. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And you can go to NoSafeSpaces.com and find it and really take your kids. | ||
| I mean, take the wife, take the husband, take the husband and the wife, but take The 13 and 14 year old sons and daughters and let them know what's going on out there. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about comedy instead of the non-stop yelling you get everywhere else, check out our comedy playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're both right over here. |
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