Feb. 5, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
47:12
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| My friend Larry K. Thank you, Dave. | ||
| It's always good to see you. | ||
| I'm thrilled that you're here. | ||
| We just watched together in my living room, which is, that's pretty much as good as it gets for me. | ||
| It's a beautiful house, a beautiful setup. | ||
| And I think that speech was about an hour and 15? | ||
| About an hour and 15. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So I asked you right before we started, does this make you nervous? | ||
| We're live on YouTube. | ||
| Are you a little nervous right now? | ||
| I mean, you've done a lot, but not this kind of thing. | ||
| Well, I got to tell you, there's only, this is the truth. | ||
| One time in my life, I was nervous. | ||
| It was my first day on the air. | ||
| Let me give you a little history. | ||
| All my life, I wanted to be on the radio. | ||
| That's all I thought of. | ||
| When I was a kid, 8, 9, 10 years old, I'd listen to radio stations. | ||
| The Shadow Nose and Suspense. | ||
| I wanted to be that. | ||
| I wanted to be that announcer. | ||
| Graduated high school, didn't go to college. | ||
| Knocked around a bunch of odd jobs. | ||
| And one day, I ran into James Sermons, chief of announcers at CBS. | ||
| I said, what do you say? | ||
| I want to get into radio. | ||
| He said, go to Miami. | ||
| It's a lot of stations, no union, so there's a lot of guys on the way up and a lot of guys on the way out. | ||
| I went to Miami, knocked on doors, got thrown up at a small radio station. | ||
| Hired me, gave me a radio test. | ||
| And they said, OK, you'll start next Monday playing records for three hours in the morning, disc jockey, and then do sports and news in the afternoon. | ||
| Conventional small radio station, six announcers, you know, 55 hours a week. | ||
| Well, my heaven had come. | ||
| All week long, I stayed picking up my records and saying to myself, good evening, good morning, good morning, good morning, good morning. | ||
| Scared to death. | ||
| And then he calls me into his office, the general manager, about 10 minutes before airtime. | ||
| And he says, what name are you going to use? | ||
| Well, my name was Larry Zeiger, and I didn't know how they would use it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But he said, that's too ethnic. | ||
| People won't know how to spell it, too ethnic. | ||
| Need another name. | ||
| Need another name, I'm on here. | ||
| And he's got the Miami Herald open. | ||
| And it was an ad for King's Wholesale Liquors. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| And he said, how about Larry King? | ||
| I said, okay, that sounds good. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| Now I go into the other ear. | ||
| Play my first record, Les Elgar swinging down the lane. | ||
| I lower the record and turn on the mic and nothing comes out. | ||
| Then I raise up the record, then I lower the record and the general manager He kicked open the doors to the control room and he said, This is a communication business. | ||
| Communicate! | ||
| And what I did then, Dave, I swear, I turned on the mic. | ||
| And I said, good morning, my name is Larry King, and that's the first time I've said that. | ||
| Because I've just been given that name. | ||
| And this is my first day on the air, and I wanted it all my life, and I'm scared to death. | ||
| Scared to death. | ||
| And I was. | ||
| And then I realized something. | ||
| This was told to me many months later and years later. | ||
| What you did that morning was discover the secret of this whole business. | ||
| There's no secret. | ||
| Be yourself. | ||
| If you're yourself, you can't make someone like you or not like you. | ||
| But what I did that morning was... | ||
| If I goofed and played a record at the wrong speed, hey, it's his first day. | ||
| Read the commercial poorly, it's his first day. | ||
| So when you're honest with the audience, you can't go wrong. | ||
| Just be yourself. | ||
| And I was never nervous again, ever. | ||
| You know, I remember the first time that I interviewed you, which is years ago. | ||
| It was the first time we had met, actually. | ||
| So we had never met before we sat down. | ||
| And I said to you, what's the secret? | ||
| And you said, you know, Dave, at the height of my success, The show is Larry King Tonight. | ||
| My name was in it. | ||
| My ego was stroked. | ||
| I was good to go. | ||
| That's why I have a big sign with my name right now. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Always put your name up. | ||
| Someone told me, when I signed at CNN with Ted Turner, he said, well, what are we going to call the show? | ||
| We could call it Night Client or something. | ||
| So I forget who came up with it. | ||
| A friend of mine said, how about Larry King Live? | ||
| The best thing about having that is even when you're not there, you're there. | ||
| Your name stays. | ||
| Nothing like your name, of course, it can disappear fast. | ||
| Yeah, so we could talk about all that forever, and we've done it many times, but let's talk a little State of the Union. | ||
| You told me, as we were watching, the first one of these things you covered, 1959, Dwight Eisenhower. | ||
| Yeah, that was his last State of the Union. | ||
| I had voted for Adlai Stevenson, who was one of my heroes, who I later interviewed. | ||
| Eisenhower was a fine president. | ||
| Adlai Stevenson, in my opinion, would have been a great president. | ||
| But I admired Eisenhower. | ||
| Then the first State of the Union I saw was his, which was his last. | ||
| And then John Kennedy's, and I've seen every one since. | ||
| I've never been in the gallery where everybody got introduced tonight. | ||
| They introduced every single person. | ||
| I thought he was going to say, and now. | ||
| Henrik Malone, the guy selling peanuts. | ||
| This guy saw his father collapse while selling peanuts on a bread line. | ||
| There aren't no bread lines anymore. | ||
| Audience applause. | ||
| Do you see more theater in it now than there used to be? | ||
| So, like, pre-TV days, when you were doing it just so. | ||
| It's radio back then. | ||
| It's hard for people my age to imagine. | ||
| Well, TV really started with Kennedy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But there wasn't the impact it has now. | ||
| The impact of television is incredible. | ||
| We're on YouTube now. | ||
| Yeah, but there's a hundred different types of things. | ||
| There's 500 stations, and the choice is way up for everybody. | ||
| So, like, tonight, Every network carried this, the cable networks, television networks. | ||
| So you know who did well tonight? | ||
| Movies. | ||
| Movies did well. | ||
| Because the state of the union, all states of the union, are a projection of one's own success and the nation's success. | ||
| So he's not going to point out any of the failures, legislation didn't get passed, what went wrong. | ||
| He's just got a point of success. | ||
| Are the fax checkers at work now? | ||
| They're working hard. | ||
| All over the networks and at the newspapers, they're saying everything he said. | ||
| For example, lowest unemployment rate in the history of America. | ||
| They're going to check all that. | ||
| And they know he has a tendency to... | ||
| Exaggerate. | ||
| Let's put it this way. | ||
| Lie. | ||
| I know Donald Trump forever. | ||
| I know him 40 years. | ||
| Oh, he did my TV. | ||
| He did my radio show years ago. | ||
| He's been very nice to me. | ||
| I'll tell you something. | ||
| I had a little procedure in the hospital. | ||
| Went to New York. | ||
| He took my wife and her friend out to dinner. | ||
| I stayed at every one of his hotels. | ||
| He always comped it. | ||
| He gave me stuff from his shop, which I still wear some of his ties, at Trump Tower. | ||
| So what he was during those ages to us, he was Donald Trump. | ||
| Fun guy with an incredible ego. | ||
| But the ego was so powerful to him that we just overlooked it. | ||
| Every other sentence was I. I did this, I did that, I did this. | ||
| But president? | ||
| We never thought of him as president, ever. | ||
| So watching him tonight, it still hits at me that this is a guy. | ||
| Is it weird for you that, because he's just sort of a New York businessman, like as a guy that came out of media and all of that stuff. | ||
| I know, but when he owned a hotel in Atlantic City, I went there to do a radio remote, right? | ||
| And I had Bill Cosby on. | ||
| And Trump was in the audience. | ||
| He came on, walked right onto the set, stayed for three hours. | ||
| He was a man of the media. | ||
| But to see him as president is still, waves run through me as I watch this. | ||
| Because I know this guy. | ||
| And like him. | ||
| Although I know his opinions now are not what they were then. | ||
| So you like the man Donald Trump as you know him. | ||
| You're not a particular fan of his policies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's basically what I was saying. | |
| I'm not a conservative. | ||
| I'm a moderate liberal. | ||
| But some of the stuff he did tonight offended me a little. | ||
| It seemed like patriots or the Second Amendment. | ||
| You've got a country full of violence, kids being killed in schools, and you're supporting the Second Amendment. | ||
| So it was a very conservative speech. | ||
| But he delivered it well. | ||
| He never strayed, which he has a tendency to do. | ||
| Could you tell, in your heyday, when you were interviewing all these guys over 40 years, could you tell which people loved the camera, which guys were nervous, which guys could really be authentic, which guys could fake it? | ||
| You try your best you can. | ||
| Presidents learn to be pretty good, you know, like they're in the public eye and they become president. | ||
| So there's no president who handles TV poorly. | ||
| The best was Clinton, by far. | ||
| And then Obama, right behind him. | ||
| Obama was the most eloquent of our presidents, and that's something I miss. | ||
| I miss his eloquence. | ||
| I miss... In times of dire straits, there were nothing like Obama. | ||
| If you had a killing... Remember that time? | ||
| There was a killing of some children. | ||
| He did so many, it got sad. | ||
| But in the middle of his speech, he's speaking, and then he goes, Amazing grace, how sweet thou art. | ||
| And he recites the whole song in the middle of this eulogy, which is fantastic. | ||
| So he had a great instinct for that. | ||
| Trump is Trump. | ||
| You know, here's what he is, what you saw tonight. | ||
| You know, he's proud of what he's done. | ||
| But as I say, the fact checkers are at work. | ||
| There are some questions I have, too. | ||
| So when you hear people now say, because I know you're still a creature of this, every time I go to your house, you got CNN on, you still love all this stuff. | ||
| Oh, I'm still doing it. | ||
| And you're still doing it. | ||
| You're still doing your show and everything else. | ||
| When you're paying attention to all this and everyone says, you know, we hate each other more than ever before, we've never been at each other's throats like this, the country's coming apart and all that, can you give me a little perspective on that from some of the battles that you've seen? | ||
| Oh, I've seen a lot of battles. | ||
| But the one thing I love about watching this is half the audience applauding. | ||
| Nancy Pelosi making faces. | ||
| A lot of faces with Pelosi. | ||
| And of course, the people from the armed services, they can't applaud. | ||
| And the Supreme Court justices certainly can't. | ||
| I mean, Kavanaugh couldn't get up and throw his arms around and say, thank you. | ||
| So there's kind of a facade to it. | ||
| You know, it's a ritual every four years. | ||
| Do you know that the original State of the Union was delivered by hand? | ||
| Thomas Jefferson did the first one. | ||
| And so they decided that every inaugural four years, you deliver the State of the Union. | ||
| And when did it become popular? | ||
| Television. | ||
| Must be television. | ||
| Eisenhower, I'm sure he did a radio one in 56. | ||
| I think Kennedy's was the first largely television. | ||
| I could be wrong, but in my memory, Kennedy's was the first. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So do you think we get out of this sort of gridlock that it seems like we're in? | ||
| Or does this feel new to you? | ||
| I've never seen this country. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| It's a 50-50 country at odds with itself. | ||
| And I don't know what the cure is. | ||
| You know, I remember, so I used to be able to name every United States senator and where they were from. | ||
| Every one. | ||
| We all knew our congressman and senators. | ||
| I interviewed people like Hubert Humphrey and Joe Biden. | ||
| And Barry Gord. | ||
| And these guys were friendly with each other. | ||
| So they could argue on the floor and then go to dinner together. | ||
| There's none of that anymore. | ||
| Republicans don't go to dinner with... It was that senator from Utah. | ||
| Did the eulogy at Teddy Kennedy's funeral. | ||
| You won't see that now. | ||
| When did this happen? | ||
| Or how did it happen? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| How did this cleavage occur? | ||
| Dare I say some of it had something to do with cable news? | ||
| Do you think that's possible? | ||
| Oh, a lot to do with cable news. | ||
| Could you feel that? | ||
| Could you feel that? | ||
| Even though you were doing interviews, so you were sort of... Well, no, in my age of cable news, CNN, then, and I stopped in 19... I stopped in 2010. | ||
| There were still some interview shows. | ||
| Cable news since then has become... Every show has 16 guests. | ||
| Is that crazy to you, as someone that does this? | ||
| Yes, it is, because I don't learn anything from that. | ||
| I still do it on RT and Aura and Hulu. | ||
| That day may be over, of the sit-down interview, a host who doesn't take stands. | ||
| What we have now is fiber, crazy cable news. | ||
| It's almost like thundering on us. | ||
| I watch sports most of the time. | ||
| But whenever I turn on, MSNBC is all liberal. | ||
| Fox News is an oxymoron. | ||
| They call it Fox News. | ||
| And CNN has even become very liberal, in my opinion. | ||
| So, you know what? | ||
| The only place you get the news today is ABC, CBS, NBC at 6.30 at night. | ||
| So you think that's still pretty honest? | ||
| I watched them tonight and they also covered a flood somewhere. | ||
| The weather moving across the country. | ||
| You don't see weather on cable news anymore. | ||
| It's Trump all the time. | ||
| And that's one thing fascinating about Trump. | ||
| We talk about him every day. | ||
| I'll bet most Americans use his name at least once a day. | ||
| And that part is fascinating. | ||
| Because we've never had a president with a personality like this. | ||
| If you like him, you like him. | ||
| And if you don't like him, he infuriates you. | ||
| I've got a friend of mine who can't stand him but watches every word he says. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's almost like a psychological condition. | ||
| Love-hate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| It's amazing to me to watch it. | ||
| But this whole process, like you see it when you do these interviews, right? | ||
| You get it from all sides. | ||
| But I've never, as I said, we're getting repetitive, I've never seen the country this split. | ||
| Orrin Hatch spoke at Ted Kennedy's. | ||
| Ah, Orrin Hatch from Utah, there you go. | ||
| You're fact-checking yourself. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| That's a pretty good guess. | ||
| But I didn't name the wrong Senate. | ||
| No, you did not. | ||
| What do you make of just the last couple days? | ||
| I mean, Iowa yesterday and there's no declared winner and it just sort of seems, do you get the sense that our machinery seems to be breaking down? | ||
| In this modern era of communication, I still don't understand the caucuses. | ||
| They've been explained to me, I've been in Iowa before, I've been in Cedar Rapids and in all those cities. | ||
| I don't understand it. | ||
| I don't think the people who do the caucuses understand it. | ||
| I mean, you see kids flipping coins to give... Yeah, and then if I don't like my vote, I'll run over and get your vote. | ||
| So it's understandable why tabulating this would be trouble, but not as embarrassing as this is for the Democratic Party. | ||
| But it was a great night for Mayor Pete. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it seems a little unclear. | ||
| I guess he's saying it was a good night for him, but they haven't released it. | ||
| Well, you know he's in the top three. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And with 65% in as we're talking, he's first. | ||
| Is that your, when you say you're like a moderate Democrat, and it's funny because for years you didn't really share your opinion. | ||
| No, I never did. | ||
| You never did, so it's really only in the last couple of years. | ||
| You know what I'm talking now? | ||
| Now you have to have an opinion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I give an opinion, but I've always had the respect of the person I've interviewed, and many of them knew my opinions, but they always knew I was fair. | ||
| I never interrupted if the case didn't require it. | ||
| Sometimes you had to interrupt. | ||
| So I always felt that my duty to the audience was, I was a conduit. | ||
| If you're my guest, what you say through me to them. | ||
| And the best thing I could do, it asked the best questions I could think of. | ||
| Hopefully short. | ||
| You know, now the guys do eight minute lead ups to the question. | ||
| What's the question? | ||
| I noticed another phenomenon on MSNBC and CNN and others. | ||
| They don't ask questions anymore. | ||
| They make a full statement and then nod. | ||
| In fact, you don't even know who they're asking when they have the three remotes. | ||
| I used to love five different people in five different places. | ||
| They don't direct the question anyway. | ||
| They introduce the guest, and then they said, today, and then they give their whole perspective of today, and then they stop, and the priest will go, who's he? | ||
| Who's the question? | ||
| And what is the question? | ||
| There's a lot of statements that are not questions. | ||
| Yeah, well it's interesting because this, this thing, I mean the long form thing is actually doing really well online. | ||
| It doesn't play on cable news. | ||
| What you're doing is, I'm surprised that it still exists. | ||
| You know, I'll tell you something that, I wasn't planning on mentioning this, but one of the things that I'm sort of struggling with a little bit as an interviewer, so now that I got here I may as well get some advice from the legend, is that because people know my opinions about things, I do find at times, if I bring on a guest now, who someone knows that I really disagree with, If I don't disagree with them, people think I'm just being a pushover or something, where I want to do what you just said, which is be that conduit for their ideas to get out. | ||
| And it makes it tougher as an interviewer. | ||
| Go back to just be yourself. | ||
| Whatever they may think, you can't think for them. | ||
| Just be yourself. | ||
| You have your opinions. | ||
| I don't mind opinionated interviewers, as long as the person they're interviewing knows the opinion. | ||
| And they're fair. | ||
| You know, fair is an interesting word. | ||
| Why not be fair? | ||
| That's what I always try to be, fair, so that I never had a guest say to me, oh yeah, once I had a woman walked off, I forget who she was, she ripped her mic off. | ||
| Because of Larry King, the badass. | ||
| She was Miss USA. | ||
| And she had made a statement about abortion, or what I get it was. | ||
| And I asked her, and she says, that's inappropriate. | ||
| And I said, well, why is it inappropriate? | ||
| And she ripped her mic off and stormed off. | ||
| But that's all showbiz. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The balancing of showbiz versus news, I think, is getting completely out of control. | ||
| I think that's part of the problem. | ||
| Did you consider yourself a newsman, really, as an interviewer? | ||
| I'll tell you what I've been asked for. | ||
| I considered myself an infotainer. | ||
| I provided information in an entertaining manner. | ||
| We could read the encyclopedia and provide information. | ||
| So I tried to make my interviews informative, but you don't want to click on it, you don't want to change the station. | ||
| So I had a manner, I don't know if I could explain it, but I provided entertainment while you were being informed. | ||
| Yeah, all right, we're gonna do some live questions. | ||
| This is like when you used to do the live call-ins, remember that? | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Did you ever get real? | ||
| What was the craziest one? | ||
| Oh, I used to, when I did the all-night show, which was the first national network radio all-night show, and I was on from midnight to five in the morning, and three hours was a guest. | ||
| I'd interview the guest for an hour and a half, And then take calls for the guests. | ||
| And then for two hours was Open Phone America. | ||
| Which any subject could be discussed. | ||
| Clinton called in when he was governor of Arkansas. | ||
| Bill Cosby ran the streets to come up to that show. | ||
| Limbaugh called in. | ||
| There was just a potpourri. | ||
| And I loved it. | ||
| But I had some crazy callers who were regular callers. | ||
| The regulars all the way in. | ||
| It was hard to get in because the regulars get in about once every ten days. | ||
| One regular was the Portland Laugher. | ||
| They tell me what city is calling, so we never screened a call. | ||
| I just want to know what city. | ||
| Portland, Oregon. | ||
| Portland, Oregon. | ||
| And this guy just laughed. | ||
| I got something to say, pass, and I'd ask him a question, he'd laugh, and I'd hang up. | ||
| The Syracuse Chair. | ||
| Aha. | ||
| This guy called in one night when Ronald Reagan was running for election against Jimmy Carter. | ||
| There was a third person in the race. | ||
| God, I forgot his name. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter, so 78... Anderson, John Anderson. | |
| Running as... He wanted to get in the debate. | ||
| Reagan wanted him in the debate. | ||
| Carter didn't want him in the debate. | ||
| So they had a conversation and decided he wouldn't be in the debate. | ||
| And this guy calls in and says he's the Syracuse chair. | ||
| I said, what is that? | ||
| He says he was called in to be in the debate. | ||
| He was going to be Anderson's chair. | ||
| And they cancelled him. | ||
| They cancelled him. | ||
| So he was sent back to Syracuse with airfare. | ||
| So he used to call in regularly. | ||
| But I had one guy who called in and believed he could predict all baseball scores only after the game. | ||
| That's a talent right there. | ||
| Yeah, there's something, that radio thing is magical. | ||
| Oh, it was still the magic. | ||
| When I was just starting stand-up way back when, I used to go on, do you remember Joey Reynolds? | ||
| Sure, I know Joey. | ||
| I used to go on Joey Reynolds' W.O.R. | ||
| show, and it was just a crazy potpourri of the strangest people you could ever imagine, and we would just talk. | ||
| How about Joe, what was that other one? | ||
| Joe Franklin. | ||
| Joe Franklin, tell about Joe Franklin. | ||
| I did his show too. | ||
| I did, I'm on with two other, I'm on. | ||
| I'm on with Steven Eady. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| And then he brings on his next guest. | ||
| And this next guest has written a book on camp. | ||
| And what his book was, was about political camp. | ||
| And Joey Franklin thinks it's about going camping. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| It was hysterical. | ||
| Oh, you mean the other camping. | ||
| The other camp, yeah. | ||
| You have questions? | ||
| Yeah, people are giving us questions. | ||
| So, well, there were a couple along this line. | ||
| Do you miss when celebrities weren't so political? | ||
| Like the days of, you know, Sinatra and those little guys, that they would tell you, you know, you sort of knew what they thought, but not everything was screaming about politics. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| There was nothing like, you know, Sinatra was a friend and I had a lovely time with him. | ||
| But no, my favorite interviews were comics. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Rickles and Mel Brooks, who's the funniest man on earth. | ||
| I loved the humor of it. | ||
| I have a great sense of humor. | ||
| I appreciated a great sense of humor. | ||
| And also, I loved interviewing movie stars. | ||
| Do you think Rickles would make it these days, knowing how politically correct everything is? | ||
| Well, Rickles was never political. | ||
| He never cursed. | ||
| But Rickles found a formula early on, started in Miami, pretty much. | ||
| That ridiculed people in a way that they took it. | ||
| And I had so many instances. | ||
| Rickles, I'll give you one light. | ||
| Sinatra's in the audience. | ||
| Rickles goes, Frank. | ||
| Frank. | ||
| The chambermaid. | ||
| The chambermaid, Frank. | ||
| My mother. | ||
| Frank. | ||
| Listen, Frank. | ||
| Go up to your room. | ||
| Take some hot chocolate. | ||
| Go to sleep. | ||
| You're old. | ||
| Frank is laughing. | ||
| And then there's a guy with him, and Rickles says to the guy, it's okay to laugh. | ||
| Frank says it's okay. | ||
| Frank says it's okay. | ||
| So my most wonderful times are with entertainers, and I still get to do a few, but it's less and less. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you were starting now, do you think you'd be doing the same thing? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is the world shut off from long-form interviews? | ||
| Well, this is doing all right. | ||
| Joe Rogan's got a great podcast that's long-form. | ||
| I mean, it's happening online. | ||
| I guess I would come in this way. | ||
| Yeah, I'd rent you my garage. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I'm gonna waive the fee. | ||
| You want the garage, it's all yours. | ||
| I'd come in. | ||
| Now the big thing now is podcasts. | ||
| It's podcasts. | ||
| It's this. | ||
| And I think I'm going to do one. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| I've got this group of people with some money and they've talked to me about doing a podcast. | ||
| Larry, I'll be your guest. | ||
| Now why a podcast? | ||
| What a podcast? | ||
| I mean you get it from the radio. | ||
| You get it on your phone. | ||
| On your phone. | ||
| Download it or stream it right on your phone. | ||
| How do they know where to find you? | ||
| That phone. | ||
| I have a different kind of phone. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| to like the iTunes store or on Spotify or some of these other apps and it's all there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| And you just, you play it right then and there. | ||
| That phone, I have a different kind of phone. | ||
| Yeah, you've got the, you got it on you? | ||
| I don't know if it's on you right now. | ||
| I think it is. | ||
| You are not a fan of the iPhone. | ||
| You like the old school. | ||
| No, I have a, what happened to it? | ||
| Oh, maybe somebody's got it outside. | ||
| It's okay, but you've got an old school flip phone. | ||
| Flip phone. | ||
| You know why I have it? | ||
| It's a phone! | ||
| You can actually phone with it. | ||
| First of all, you can put it up to your ear. | ||
| There's an ear and a speaker, and you dial a number and they answer. | ||
| You're literally the only person that I call because you don't text. | ||
| I don't text. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Texting took away the art of conversation. | ||
| I can see its importance. | ||
| You're stuck somewhere and you're texting it. | ||
| But basically, we become a society of that. | ||
| You see that? | ||
| You just did. | ||
| Well, I'm making sure. | ||
| Are you a victim of that? | ||
| Oh, I'm a complete victim of it. | ||
| I try not to do it on the weekends, and I disappear in August and some stuff. | ||
| I once was going with my wife to the airport, and halfway there, a flight to Vegas, she has forgotten her phone. | ||
| So I said, well, you know, someone can send it to me. | ||
| I took the plane, she came on a later plane. | ||
| She had to go back to get her cell phone. | ||
| And I don't want to be, you know, I was a smoker for a lot of years. | ||
| Had a heart attack, stopped smoking. | ||
| And I was owned by the cigarette. | ||
| The cigarette owned me, I didn't own it. | ||
| And I believe that phone owns you. | ||
| You, Dave Rubin, are owned by that phone, because you can't get it out of your hand. | ||
| You must look at it a hundred times a day. | ||
| What are you looking for? | ||
| Mostly nonsense. | ||
| I mean, most of what people are doing on it is nonsense. | ||
| If I wasn't doing this for a living, I would be doing it way less, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You wouldn't. | |
| But, you know, that's what everybody says, right? | ||
| Everybody has, and they all deny they use it a lot. | ||
| No, no, no, I don't use it. | ||
| No, no, no, I don't use it. | ||
| You use it all day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know. | ||
| See what happened now? | ||
| I'm nervous. | ||
| I lost my flip phone. | ||
| Is it in my jacket? | ||
| You're freaking out. | ||
| We'll find out. | ||
| Is it in his jacket, guys? | ||
| Who has my flip phone? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll never be at ease unless I find one. | |
| Are you disturbed about what seems to be the rise of socialism amongst young people? | ||
| First of all, we're half socialism. | ||
| America is half socialist. | ||
| Social security is socialism. | ||
| Binding together to help. | ||
| So when you pay Social Security, you're not helping you, you're helping someone 68 years old, right? | ||
| That's socialism. | ||
| People say police force is socialism. | ||
| We all pay them to take care of us as a group. | ||
| Taxes, I pay a little more than you. | ||
| So there are degrees of socialism. | ||
| Now, the word, the Republicans are going to play on this word and call whoever the Democratic nominee is a socialist. | ||
| The only true socialist is Bernie Sanders. | ||
| Bernie Sanders is a true socialist, which is take from everybody, take from the rich, give to the poor, and try to balance it out so that no one goes hungry. | ||
| The aims of socialism are very high. | ||
| Norman Thomas ran on the Socialist Party ticket in 1932 when Roosevelt was elected. | ||
| There were 20 planks in his, you know, what he wants you to vote for. | ||
| 18 are now law. | ||
| Unemployment insurance is socialism. | ||
| Well, you're not entitled to unemployment insurance. | ||
| You lose your job, you lose it. | ||
| Socialism, that means the community has combined together to help you till you get a job. | ||
| That's socialism. | ||
| You think it's possible? | ||
| But it's a word that is unpopular. | ||
| Trump used it in his speech tonight. | ||
| It's an unpopular word without fully examining what you're saying. | ||
| So I'm a part socialist. | ||
| I sure am. | ||
| Is Trump just a creature of media more than anything else? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| Did he ever talk about being a politician way back when? | ||
| When he talked about politics back then, he was pro-choice, very pro-choice. | ||
| Big supporter of Hillary. | ||
| Big supporter of Hillary. | ||
| Trump going to write the life? | ||
| Okay, I'll leave it at that. | ||
| So there are parts. | ||
| Well, let's say, to put it nicely, he's changed. | ||
| He's changed. | ||
| I see, you're being diplomatic. | ||
| He's changed from the Trump I knew then. | ||
| Even as the guest, you're being diplomatic. | ||
| I'm trying to be diplomatic. | ||
| So my phone, where is my phone? | ||
| Someone get the man a phone, he's freaking out. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| You don't even text on the thing and you're freaking out without the phone, which I guess illustrates the point. | ||
| I guess that's it right there. | ||
| One of these phone calls, these are questions you're reading? | ||
| These are people that submitted questions to us. | ||
| Do you think the impeachment thing means anything? | ||
| I think it's going to help Trump. | ||
| You think it helps? | ||
| I think the best idea would have been to censor him. | ||
| I feel bad, I'm looking at my phone. | ||
| To censor him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The Senate has censored many people, Joe McCarthy and others. | ||
| So you don't impeach, but what you're saying as a body, we don't like what you did. | ||
| It'd be hard to vote against that. | ||
| And I think that's what Nancy Pelosi wanted to do. | ||
| She was against impeachment for a long time, and I think they forced her into it. | ||
| But it made Trump look like a victim. | ||
| Even though he certainly, he certainly was saying to Ukraine, A, do me a favor. | ||
| And we all know what that was about, and every Republican knew what it was about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But that gets to what you were saying about this sort of partisan way of just, you pick your side and that's sort of where we're at. | ||
| And these guys aren't going to get in with each other anymore or any of these things. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| You're the only Republican moderates. | ||
| I grew up with a lot of them. | ||
| New York Herald Tribune. | ||
| There's some great... You, Scott of Pennsylvania. | ||
| Jake Javits of New York. | ||
| He's a distant cousin of mine, actually. | ||
| Oh yeah? | ||
| Great man. | ||
| Great man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, he's got a phone! | |
| Now let me show you this phone. | ||
| Show us this phone! | ||
| Samsung makes it. | ||
| I visited that company in Korea. | ||
| Samsung makes... | ||
| And it's ringing right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| Hello? | ||
| Hey, Dad. | ||
| Hey, Cannon, where are you? | ||
| I just got back from school from our game. | ||
| You didn't have a game today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We had two. | |
| I had to get up at 6 a.m. | ||
| Our game was in the morning. | ||
| I got a list. | ||
| You got a doubleheader this coming Saturday. | ||
| How did you do? | ||
| do. Oh, that's great. That's a .333 batting average, Cannon. | ||
| Well, I'm doing David Rubin's podcast now. | ||
| I'm on his show, and while talking to you, the audience is watching me talk to you. | ||
| Oh, wow! | ||
| Cannon, you're a stardust. | ||
| You could do ten minutes when you open the refrigerator. | ||
| He wants to do his own podcast. | ||
| I'll bring him in. | ||
| He's going to be 20 years old. | ||
| I'll bring him in. | ||
| He's a great kid. | ||
| All right, Ken. | ||
| When am I going to see you? | ||
| Tonight, I'm tied up. | ||
| Tomorrow, I got to do the hump. | ||
| How about Thursday? | ||
| How about Friday night? | ||
| All right. | ||
| The night before your doubleheader. | ||
| I'll be at both games. | ||
| Okay, I'll be there. | ||
| I love you, Cannon. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Talk to you tomorrow. | ||
| What? | ||
| What? | ||
| No, what? | ||
| Today? | ||
| That's great. | ||
| The Dodgers got Mookie Betts and David Price today. | ||
| You're breaking news for me, man. | ||
| That's tremendous. | ||
| Who did they give up for them? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fredo, it came at a cost. | |
| We gave up John Peterson for the Angels in a three-way trade. | ||
| Then we gave up Penta Maeda and Alex Verdugo. | ||
| No, that's two pretty good players. | ||
| Kento Maeda can picture it. | ||
| Alex Verdugo is going to be a star. | ||
| So, Peterson, is there someone going from the Angels to the Red Sox? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, we got someone from the Angels. We got a rookie last year. He's a Dominican guy. | |
| Wow. Check. | ||
| Cannon, you bring me great news! | ||
| That's great, Cannon. | ||
| Thank you for this. | ||
| And the audience here thanks you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, tell them any time. | |
| He says, tell them any time. | ||
| Okay, Cannon, baby. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Talk to you tomorrow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love you. | |
| Bye. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| Well, folks, the Dodgers got Wookie Betts and, um... | ||
| David Price and Jack Peterson went to the Angels three-way trade. | ||
| See, you are a newsman, breaking news. | ||
| See, that's my excitement. | ||
| Do you realize that thousands and thousands of people... Now know that Mookie Betts is out of Dodgers. | ||
| And now know that you love your son. | ||
| You love your kids. | ||
| I've seen you with a couple of your kids. | ||
| I've got three grown. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the other two are grown, 21 and 20. | ||
| He's 20, he's the youngest. | ||
| He's a peach of a kid. | ||
| He's just, he's all over the place. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As you could almost tell from that. | ||
| Chance is 21. | ||
| He'll be 21 in March. | ||
| He goes to USC. | ||
| He's doing an internship at Fox Sports. | ||
| He's a baseball pitcher. | ||
| He's a great kid. | ||
| Is baseball your true love more than anything? | ||
| Yeah, I love all sports. | ||
| I love the Clippers. | ||
| I love basketball. | ||
| I love pro football, but baseball. | ||
| Baseball to me, It's the supreme sport. | ||
| It's a perfect sport. | ||
| It is athletic chess. | ||
| No one's ever mastered it. | ||
| No one ever hit 500. | ||
| It has all the little intricacies. | ||
| Did you grow up with it or not? | ||
| Oh yeah, of course. | ||
| I'm from New York. | ||
| You're a big Yankees fan. | ||
| Therefore you can go to a game and you know why the left fielder is moving over three steps to his left. | ||
| And that's fascinating. | ||
| So people think, if you're an adult and you don't know it, you think it's boring. | ||
| But if you grew up with it, and you know the game, there's nothing like baseball. | ||
| And you're an old Brooklyn guy. | ||
| Brooklyn Dodgers. | ||
| I died with them. | ||
| I died with the L.A. | ||
| Dodgers. | ||
| The Brooklyn Dodgers were a religion. | ||
| I lost my religion a long time ago. | ||
| So I guess baseball's my new religion. | ||
| So you talked about the Clippers for a second. | ||
| Just talking about basketball, Kobe. | ||
| For all the athletes that you interviewed, when you saw somebody that was just sort of at the peak of everything that they do, can you describe what that is? | ||
| Kobe was an amazing guy. | ||
| I had dinner with him a few times. | ||
| He was an amazing, not basketball player, human being. | ||
| His love of his children was just intense. | ||
| The way he treated them and got involved in their lives. | ||
| He was an example of fatherhood. | ||
| You put up a picture of fatherhood. | ||
| Kobe Bryant was your guy. | ||
| So for all the spiritual people you've talked to, we've talked about this a little bit, you know, you've talked to great thinkers and philosophers and what's life about and all that. | ||
| When you see a life like that, just cut short, I don't know, plus the kids. | ||
| I'll tell you what you think of them. | ||
| First thing I think of is your hope. | ||
| You hope that they never saw it coming. | ||
| You hope that they went out of the fog, hit a mountain, and they're in the middle of talking, they hit it. | ||
| That's what you pray. | ||
| Of course, I always wonder what it must be like to people in a crash when they know they're gonna crash. | ||
| But I thought of it with Kobe and his little daughter and how he loved her and that baseball coach. | ||
| Sad. | ||
| I don't know that I'll ever find out the whole story because you can't interview any of the people involved. | ||
| But that helicopter was doing something wrong. | ||
| Well, it was a really foggy day and I guess they went too high or then they lost touch. | ||
| You can't, you're not supposed to fly low, you're supposed to stay above the fog. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| There was some confusion. | ||
| But you never talked to a religious leader or anyone that sort of... No, no, no, I know you talked to religious leaders, but I mean anyone that sort of said something that gave sort of extra comfort about those existential questions, right? | ||
| Billy Graham was pretty good. | ||
| Billy Graham used to tell me, I don't care what you say Larry, you have the spirit of God in you. | ||
| I'm in a couple of his books. | ||
| He thought I was spiritual. | ||
| He thought I would find Christ. | ||
| I don't believe any of it. | ||
| I lost that a long time ago. | ||
| I can't believe someone is up there watching me, and I look at the Earth, and if there is a God, He's failed. | ||
| Look at mankind. | ||
| I was talking about this the other day. | ||
| We're on this planet such a short time, right? | ||
| Why on Earth do we have war? | ||
| Why? | ||
| You tell me. | ||
| Why do we have war on this Earth in such a short span of time, and we decide to kill each other? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's insanity. | |
| It's insanity. | ||
| Going to war is insane. | ||
| Throwing rocks at each other is insane. | ||
| Killing each other is insane. | ||
| That's beyond my paycheck. | ||
| Yeah, but you've always liked having those conversations, because I've seen you had a million of those conversations with the Dalai Lama, and with... The Dalai Lama, and all the... Norman Vincent Peale, and the Billy Grahams, and the Rabbi, the head of the Theological Seminary. | ||
| Sure, I've inquired him, and I never got an answer. | ||
| The one question I never got an answer. | ||
| If there is a God, how did he allow the Holocaust? | ||
| Don't say God, man's will. | ||
| He could have prevented it. | ||
| He could have prevented those people walking into gas chambers. | ||
| There is no God. | ||
| In my opinion. | ||
| As you get to a certain age, does that... No, you know, the older I get, the less I believe. | ||
| I believed more when I was 20. | ||
| I'm 86 years old. | ||
| Not bad for 86. | ||
| I've just come through a major illnesses I came through. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I had a very tough year 2019. | ||
| I still can't move my left foot. | ||
| I had a slight stroke. | ||
| That's the only thing damaged was my left foot. | ||
| But at the same, same, all at the same time I had a new stent put in in the heart. | ||
| Diagnosed with leukemia. | ||
| Chronic, not acute, thank God. | ||
| Had my bladder cancer successfully operated on. | ||
| You were on the table getting operated on. | ||
| You were awake. | ||
| I called you and you said, I've got to call you back. | ||
| One of my eight doctors says that I am in, what do you say, Something spirit. | ||
| I'm an indomitable spirit. | ||
| You have an indomitable spirit. | ||
| What keeps you going? | ||
| Why do you get up off the floor? | ||
| Can I tell you what I think it is? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I think you're curious. | ||
| I think you're curious. | ||
| You're always curious. | ||
| When we were doing shows together at Aura, when we were sharing the studio, you'd be asking the lighting guy what he's doing as much as you would ask the guests who came into the studio. | ||
| That's one thing, David. | ||
| I was that way when I was nine years old, eight years old. | ||
| I would ask the bus driver, Why do you want to drive a bus? | ||
| We'd go to baseball games, right? | ||
| Dodger games? | ||
| We'd wait for the players' entrance when they come out. | ||
| My friends wanted autographs. | ||
| I wanted to ask questions. | ||
| Why did you do this? | ||
| I was a why person. | ||
| I'm the kind of person you don't want to sit next to on an airplane. | ||
| Because I flew recently with the head of Audi Automobiles. | ||
| I drove him nuts. | ||
| I could tell he was running to the restroom when he didn't have to go, just because I want to learn about cars. | ||
| I learned a lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But you think most people, the average 86-year-old, do you think they just sort of shut that part off? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| You kind of get tired of it or something? | ||
| I'll tell you this. | ||
| I don't know it all. | ||
| I haven't heard everything. | ||
| I'm still curious. | ||
| Had a friend in radio said to me, who's an interviewer, I've asked all the questions and heard all the answers. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I have not asked all the questions, and I have not heard all the answers. | ||
| And life is still amazing to me. | ||
| I don't fear death. | ||
| Woody Allen said, I don't fear death. | ||
| I just don't want to be there. | ||
| I want to be around. | ||
| The thought of not existing is so foreign to me. | ||
| Then I'm sure it keeps me going, like... | ||
| Who's going to win the National League pennant? | ||
| I don't want to die. | ||
| Who's going to be the next president? | ||
| I don't want to die. | ||
| So as long as there's something to be curious about, I don't want to ever just accept life this is the way it is. | ||
| And so even though I'm 86, I don't feel 86. | ||
| I mean, I know I'm limping. | ||
| I'm in a wheelchair until this foot gets better. | ||
| So I have telltale signs that I'm 86. | ||
| But in here, I'm 17. | ||
| I know it. | ||
| How old are you inside? | ||
| Inside? | ||
| I'm probably a little older than that in a weird way. | ||
| I think I'm 17 to 20, somewhere in there. | ||
| Yeah, I'm somewhere in the 20s. | ||
| Draft age. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have to go down to the draft board and get my draft card. | |
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| Well, I want to be respectful of your time because I know you had a crazy day and you've got all this stuff going on. | ||
| But when I saw you a couple months ago and you had mentioned you had some health stuff going on, we're at your house, and you've got a room in your house, the trophy room, right? | ||
| That's what it's called, the trophy room, and it's got all of your stuff. | ||
| It's my ego room. | ||
| Whenever I'm feeling low, I go in that room. | ||
| But we had a really, I doubt you remember, because you weren't feeling that great that day, but we go in there, and we're standing there, and I had never been in the room before, and you have all your trophies, and every picture, every president, you've got every baseball, every basketball, everything, every pair of suspenders, everything's on there. | ||
| And we're sitting there, we're looking at it, and you go, what's it all about, Dave? | ||
| And the only thing that just sort of stumbled out of my mouth was, You see your life before you. | ||
| Letters from presidents and Sinatras, signatures, you know, all kinds. | ||
| I got Kobe sneakers. | ||
| I take pride in it. | ||
| It's a sign of accomplishment. | ||
| I'm very proud of what I accomplished. | ||
| I'm proud of what I've done. | ||
| I'm proud to be recognized. | ||
| When I got a Lifetime Achievement from the Emmys, that was an incredible night in my life. | ||
| And I really felt it. | ||
| To walk up to get a Lifetime Achievement from the Emmys was wow. | ||
| To give it to Cable Guy. | ||
| So I've never lost, as you say Curiosity, I've never lost My love of living. | ||
| The only times is when sometimes when you had to help me come in here tonight to come off a wheelchair to sit in the chair. | ||
| Then I hate it. | ||
| I hate being dependent on other people. | ||
| It just drives me nuts. | ||
| So I better walk pretty soon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's the prognosis? | ||
| They say, you know, I get a trainer and he comes in and we walk. | ||
| I can walk with a walker. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And now I'm going to start taking the walker out. | ||
| I've been walking in the house with the walker. | ||
| I'm going to take, when I go out, for example, from now on, I come here, I bring the walker, fall down the stairs with the walker. | ||
| That'll be how it all ends for me. | ||
| Larry King falls down my stairs and it's all over. | ||
| Oh, come on. | ||
| That would be your wish. | ||
| And we've been going right out of the air now to describe the perilous Larry King as he went down the stairs. | ||
| That'd be the Reuben Dream. | ||
| I love you, man. | ||
| Thanks for coming on in. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| You know, I realize we barely talk politics after all this. | ||
| No. | ||
| But what's the point? | ||
| You've got a great studio, great people here, great paintings. | ||
| Life is yours, David. | ||
| The future is yours. | ||
| Grab it! | ||
| You're my hero, man. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Thank you, baby. |
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