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June 26, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:32:22
It’s Dave's Birthday & He Got His First Gun + Live Q&A | Dave Rubin | DIRECT MESSAGE | Rubin Report
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All right, YouTube, it is a big day.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
It is the Dave Rubin 44th birthday.
Spectacular here on YouTube.
I haven't done a live stream for quite some time actually between the book and general craziness and riots and protests and all sorts of other stuff.
It's been a little haywire around here.
I'm sure it's been a little haywire.
Wherever you are, too.
So it's been a while since I've done one of these, but we're going to do a big bonanza bonkers livestream for you.
I'm answering your questions that are submitted at RubinReport.com.
Clyde is in the studio and he's stepping on the audio mixer at the moment.
That might be problematic, as the kids say, so we'll keep an eye on that.
Yeah, looks like he wants to get out of here, guys, so we can get Clyde out.
Maybe he'll come back a little later.
But yes, it is my birthday.
I'm 44 years old.
I'm pretty sure I'm the oldest person on YouTube.
Who else is on YouTube that is of that age?
You know, YouTube is for the kids.
It's a young man's game.
But a lot of people... I posted this morning on Twitter and on RubinReport.com that it's my 44th birthday.
A lot of people saying I look like I'm in my 30s.
So that is nice to hear.
I'm feeling good about the hair today.
That's got a fresh cut from my girl Jess.
Yesterday went to her house and she cut me up.
I don't know that that's even legal here in California.
It's still unclear what's happening.
But I'm feeling pretty good for 44 actually.
This has been...
2020, despite the zombie apocalypse and, you know, the coronavirus and the riots and the protests and creeping Marxism and the socialists and the communists and all that stuff.
Besides all that!
It's actually been a great year.
I mean, things are good for us right now.
The book sales were great.
Life is good.
You know, it's summer here in Cali, which is always great.
And I'm feeling good about things.
I'm actually going out to dinner tonight with friends for the first time since this whole thing went down.
I did have a drink once out.
I had a drink with Karlin Borsenko, who's been on the show a couple weeks ago.
We went out for a drink, that was very exciting.
but I'm actually going to eat a meal, I mean break bread with other human beings tonight
somewhere in an undisclosed location in Beverly Hills.
Yeah, we're fancy people.
Anyway, so I'm gonna be taking your questions.
Oh, and I wanted to tell you guys, I just posted this on Twitter,
but I did get myself a birthday present because these are weird times.
You don't know if you're gonna be seeing people, you don't know what kind of presents
are gonna be rolling in, although Helen, my assistant, did just go to the post
office and pick up all the stuff from our PO box,
and I've got like 30 boxes out there of things that you guys are sending me.
So I thank you in advance, and I'll thank you all personally
after we open some stuff later today.
But I did get myself a present.
I got my first gun.
I got a Beretta.
We just picked it up.
It's a handgun, nine millimeter.
I'm psyched, I'm gonna go.
I know I've had a ton of people You know, offer to take me shooting and we'll go to a range and all that stuff.
So I'm gonna take a couple people up on those offers.
It is our first gun.
You know, this is obviously something I've been thinking about.
I've really been thinking about it for about two years.
And then just the craziness of the last month, and particularly the riots in LA, and just the insane way the media and many of our public officials talk about the police, who I completely stand with the police, and I think 99.9% of them are great people, trying to be good public servants, and they get treated horribly.
But more than anything else, I mean, I wanted the ability to be able to Protect myself, protect myself, protect my family, protect my property, and the rest of it.
Clyde does do a hell of a job.
He barks at the gardener.
But we wanted to take that next step.
So I'm psyched.
I posted a picture of it on Twitter, which you can look at right now, just holding the gun.
I don't even think there was a magazine clip in the thing.
But apparently my finger was on the trigger, which is a big no-no.
So I thank you guys for keeping me honest.
And I saw Jason Howerton, I believe works at The First now.
He used to work at The Blaze.
He's in Texas.
He's a big gun guy.
And he tweeted out the picture and he said, that's not Dave's fault.
He's from California.
Let's give him a little bit of a learning curve here.
So I do appreciate that.
You find people.
And I'm gonna take some questions.
And really, nothing's off limits.
It's been a while since I've been able to talk to you guys.
You know, the last two months, really.
Today's June 26th.
By the way, it's also Derek Jeter's birthday.
You guys all know Derek Jeter, of course.
And a little-known basketball player, although one of my favorite basketball players of all time, although he passed away a few years ago out of nowhere, young guy, Jerome Kersey, who is mostly known for being on the Blazers in the late 80s, early 90s, was in the finals a couple times, ended up winning a championship much later in his career with the San Antonio Spurs.
He was a great player that very few people know about.
There's a little Side trivia for ya, but I spent basically all of May sitting in this chair for like 12 hours a day, sometimes even more.
Sometimes my days started about 4 a.m.
if I was doing Fox and Friends in New York at like 7 a.m.
Well, that's 4 a.m.
here, so I'd be up at 3.30, so I'd go to bed at like 10, be up at 3.30, do a hit, And then I'd go to sleep for like two hours and then have interviews pretty much all day long just sitting in this chair and I'd be talking to people literally all over the world from South Korea and Australia and Ireland and the UK and just wherever it was, Mexico and Brazil and Canada, it was pretty amazing.
But I spent about six weeks of my life, it was more than a month, about six weeks of my life just sitting in this chair just talking to people.
So it was sort of interesting because when you do these one after another after another after another, You can really figure out who the good interviewers are because they have a way of making it feel freshly that you don't go into like the usual talking points which I really tried to be as present as possible for everybody and not do the talking point stuff but you know if they're asking you about the book there's only so many ways you can talk about the same ideas over and over.
But it was super fun, but, you know, I was supposed to be on tour.
I had a tour, a countrywide tour, I think we had about 22, 25 stops, that was going to wrap at the beginning of June.
So all of May I was going to be on tour.
And then we were going to work on a UK tour, and we were going to do some stuff in Canada, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
So that's obviously still on hold, but I will tour the book at some point.
So I'm excited about that.
Oh, and you know what?
Since it's my birthday and it's just me and you here, I will tell you guys that the second book is in the works.
I am announcing it right now, yeah.
The first book obviously was a huge success, which is awesome.
New York Times bestseller, which I know, I know, I rail about the New York Times all the time and then I'm saying With pride that it's a New York Times bestseller.
It's just the way the publishing world works.
So I was happy to get on the list for the publishers and all my guys that worked so hard on promotion and all that stuff.
But it is a little weird to want sort of approval from something that, you know, you don't generally approve of.
I get it.
It is a little weird.
But the book absolutely crushed it.
Sales are still great.
And I think it was pretty freaking timely for everything going on.
You know, I probably could have titled it, Don't Burn the Store, that this book is in.
That might have been a good one.
Don't Burn the Target Down.
You might be able to pick up this book.
That would have worked.
But, you know, the book, the ideas in the book, really, are everything that we're fighting about right now.
Like, all of the stuff, all the people that are suddenly waking up and going, oh my god, it wasn't just college students.
oh my God, these ideas, these pervasive, nefarious, awful ideas that have just spread their tentacles
throughout society, they didn't just magically appear one day, there were a bunch of us.
I know you guys know this if you're watching this, but it's like there were about 20 of us online
that have been hitting this thing over and over and over for the last five years.
And people have been sending me old clips of myself talking about this stuff like four or five years ago
at public events or on the show or with guests or whatever, and it's like, yeah, I'm not surprised
about any of it, and that's exactly what the book is about, but enough book promo.
I'm gonna take some of your questions, and we're doing this on RubinReport.com, so if you go to RubinReport.com, you can submit questions.
Anything is fine, nothing is off limits.
It doesn't have to be about politics.
Hopefully I'm getting some life questions here, too, or you can ask me about music, or video games, or sports, or whatever, or what I'm wearing on my feet right now.
Fancy flip-flops, that's right.
And I'm wearing socks.
Look, I know people get upset you can't wear flip-flops with socks, but I find it oddly comfortable.
I don't know if that makes me feel like an old Russian immigrant or whatever, but I enjoy it and that's what I'm doing.
There you go.
Okay, so I'm gonna do these in no particular order.
We got a gajillion questions flying in.
Again, if you wanna throw a question in, that's RubinReport.com.
Let's see.
Janelle, well, this seems like the right one for a birthday.
Any thoughts, feelings, advice about this stage of life, being in your 40s?
I'm interested in how you feel it compares to your younger years.
You know, truly, so 44, that feels, there's something about 44 that feels like very solidly like, is that middle age?
I guess that's middle age, right?
So if it's middle, if it's smack in the middle, that means 88 is the end of the whole ride, right?
Now, hopefully, 88's actually, for these days, if you take care of yourself and medical science and everything else, like, 88's on the young side and hopefully, as time goes on, there's tons of people that are working on life extension and all that stuff.
But let's say somewhere in your 90's is about when you wrap it up, or at least at a functional level.
Interestingly, in my family, the women live an incredibly long time.
Like, I had a great-grandma, I think died at 99, and she had, I think, six sisters.
She was one of six sisters.
And they all lived into their late 90s, and they had cousins, all the women that all lived into their 90s.
The men dropped like flies very early.
My paternal grandfather died when I was in second grade.
My maternal grandfather died when my mom was pregnant with me.
I did have one great-grandfather who made it to his 90s, but the women do really well, so hopefully I got some of that woman magic in me.
But anyway, 44 seems kind of middle-aged.
Honestly, what I feel right now is that I'm basically in the prime of my life.
I'm in the prime.
Quite as quick on the basketball court as I used to be.
I do have a torn ACL.
That's one thing that happens as you get older.
I remember, I don't like bragging about it, but you guys have heard, when I got out of college and I was starting stand-up and I was interning at the Daily Show, Which I got an internship at the Daily Show.
I wasn't even in college anymore.
It was a college internship and I forged a letter on stationery to say that I was still in college just so I could get a free internship and I commuted every day into the city while I was living with my folks.
Or not every day.
I commuted Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to intern at the Daily Show and then on Tuesdays and Thursdays I was an assistant Salesman at Electronics Boutique, which most of you guys now know as GameStop, and there was an older guy that worked at the store, and you could tell this guy lived a rough life, right?
Like, because if you're just, like, the guy on the floor at GameStop, you don't make much money.
I don't remember what we were making at the time, maybe 10 bucks an hour or something like that.
And, you know, he was in his, like, probably mid to late 40s, which seemed sort of old to me at the time, right?
Like, I'm 20, I'm out of college.
And I remember one morning, you can picture a GameStop, you know, they have all those cardboard cutouts of the video game characters, and all the big posters of whatever the new PlayStation thing is, or Xbox or whatever, and we had to put up some of the new stuff, and I think we were putting up a Pokemon thing, like a big Pokemon cardboard cutout, and he's on the ladder, and I'm picking up the stuff, and I'm handing it to him, and he leans down to grab something, and I heard something snap, and he screams, I mean, the guy was writhing in pain, and he looked at me, almost tears in his eyes.
And this guy, I think maybe he had been in jail, actually.
He had lived a rough life, this guy.
And he had this job because he was trying to get his daughter back, or something like that.
And he looked at me, and he goes, Dave, one day, your body will betray you.
And I remember thinking, like, that is the saddest, most pathetic thing I've ever heard in my life.
And now, at 44, with a torn ACL, I tore my ACL four years ago playing basketball.
For the last four years, my knee, like, if I'm like, the thing with the ACL is you can't run laterally like this.
You can run straight and you're fine, right?
So I do a lot of cardio.
I do the elliptical machine.
You can run like that, but if you're playing sports where you need to go side to side, the ACL is basically what keeps the knee in place.
So for four years I've had a torn ACL and I didn't know I had a torn ACL.
I knew my knee was weak or something like that.
Anyway, last August we had my nieces and nephews here and I was throwing them around the pool all day long and I threw my nephew.
And I felt something in my shoulder, and I was like, oh!
And about a month later, I was like, all right, I gotta go to the doctor.
I go get an MRI, and I'm going into the MRI machine.
And if you haven't done an MRI machine, you're a lucky person.
It's not a fun experience.
But you go into this massive machine.
It feels very Total Recall, sci-fi, dystopian.
It's really kind of weird.
But they're putting me in the machine, and I'm going head first.
And as I'm going in, the guy's like, well, do you have anything else wrong with you as long as you're going into the machine?
I was like, you know, well four years ago I did bust my knee and I think something's still not right.
He's like, all right, well we'll take a look at that too.
Anyway, the next day I get the call with the results, which I guess in the old days used to take forever.
Now they do it literally in 24 hours.
I get the call with the results and the doctor's like, all right, Dave, I got good news and bad news.
I was like, all right.
He's like, your shoulder's fine, it's just a little inflamed, you know, you don't have to do anything, some stretching and you'll be alright.
He's like, the bad news is you don't have an ACL.
So I tore my ACL to the point that over the last four years it just disappeared.
So it's gone.
Long story short, why the hell am I telling you this?
Your body will betray you, young people.
You young people watching YouTube, enjoy it while you got it.
So now I gotta play with a knee brace.
I'm not up to that metal contraption level yet.
That's the sad thing.
When you see the old guy stroll out onto the basketball court, and he's got that metal contraption, like, trap jaw, and he's... Get out there, and, oh, God, and he's... It's all he's got left is the big metal knee, and it's, ugh, it's a disaster.
But anyway, about 40.
So I truly, I think... Look.
The stuff that I've been talking about on this show is relevant, right?
Like for some reason, I don't know what it is, cosmically or whatever, that I was able to see something five or six years ago that now everyone sees.
And I was able to warn about it for five or six years.
And I was able to talk to all of the relevant people who had been warning about it, thinking about it, seeing it.
So it's very validating, like my life, Feels very validated, actually.
Like, I wake up knowing that I'm doing something important that I actually love to do.
I very rarely have a second.
You know, it's funny, I've been saying to Michael, who's our new associate producer, that my schedule now that the book tour, the six weeks of that, has calmed down, my schedule's a little bit better, because during that I didn't have a minute during the day.
Like, at the end of the day, Whenever we wrapped up with my last interview at 9 o'clock, sometimes 11 o'clock if I was talking to somebody on the other side of the world, I could barely speak at the end of the day.
My brain was just completely fried.
And now my schedule has kind of loosened up a little bit, but it's still busy.
And I wake up every day with something to do, something to talk about.
You know, make the craziness that we're all in a little less painful.
I'm not sure I always succeed at that.
You know, I try to make things not worse on Twitter, where everyone's making them worse.
One of the things that I'm super psyched about is that we've really built something awesome with Locals.com, if you guys haven't checked it out.
I mean, just jump on rubinreport.com or download the iOS app or the Android app.
You can just search Rubin Report.
We built out some really cool tech that, we're building homes.
If you create anything online, like we will, it's your video, it's your audio, it's your user data,
all of that stuff.
We're trying to solve some of the problems.
I don't make any money from that, but I've put in a ton of time.
And on top of everything else, like I went to Silicon Valley this year and fundraised
and we did well and it's growing And by the way, this parlor thing is kind of taking off too, and I think that's great.
Dan Bongino is one of the guys behind it.
And it's like, there are many ways to fight the big tech monster.
So I want parlor to do well, I want locals to do well, I want more competition out there.
So between that, the fact that May was our biggest month ever on YouTube across every freaking metric, That they count.
Our audio numbers have been great.
I feel like I'm doing something important.
We're getting big politicians reaching out to us.
We have huge plans for the fall.
I've got a couple...
Other interesting offers that would be separate from the Rubin Report that we're trying to figure out what to do.
I don't know if you know this, there's an election coming in November.
So there's so many things that I feel like what I do is right in the center of.
And I guess, so to really answer your question, what do you feel about 40s?
It's like, I think the one thing that I can tell you guys with confidence is that if you do what you're supposed to do, Whatever that is, right?
And sometimes you don't even know what it is and you just start doing it and then time passes and you're like, holy cow, I'm really doing what I'm supposed to be doing.
If you do what you're supposed to do, time will pass faster in a good sense.
But other things in your life will fall into place.
My relationships are good now.
I've got an incredible team here that works for me, that I think feels validated in what they do and feel like it's important what they're doing.
Because of this, I've been able to build something that helps other people live the lives
that they wanna live, that's pretty great.
I'm just looking at the question again, about this stage of life.
Oh, how does it compare to my younger years?
You know, my 20s, a lot of my 20s were a mess.
I talk about this in the book, but I was closeted for way too long, and you know, you can be closeted about a lot of things, whatever it is.
I know a lot of people are politically closeted right now.
I'm sure a ton of you are politically closeted.
I guarantee you there are people watching this right now that you don't want to share this video on your Facebook page or...
Wherever, because you don't want your friends or family knowing that you watch Scary Dave Rubin.
And when you're closeted about anything, meaning you hide something about yourself, your political views, your sexuality, whatever the hell it is, you're a furry, I don't know, whatever it is, when you hide something about yourself, well then the people around you don't really know you.
There's really only room for one in the closet.
So in my 20s, I was messed up.
I was definitely messed up.
And some of that residual stuff, I think, even lasted into my 30s.
So my 40s have been much better, I think.
And look, 40s, I'm complaining about the ACL and the rest of it, but I'm physically in good shape.
I'm healthy.
I went through, I talked about the thing in the book where I I developed this alopecia areata thing, and I lost like 40 or 45% of my hair.
I should actually post one of the pictures from that.
It's pretty miserable.
I haven't wanted to do it, but this is all my hair.
It all came back.
I feel good about life.
We're working on having kids.
We have a new dog.
Things are good, so I can't complain.
And again, I think it all boils down to if you figure out what it is That you wanna do, and then you just start doing it.
And you do it again, and again, and again, and again.
It doesn't mean it's not gonna suck a lot, like, we've had ups, downs, I've had hit pieces, you know, New York Times calling me alt-right, you know, all kinds of crazy things, but in many ways I now view all of those things as the things that got me here.
So it's like now, when people write hit pieces about me, or when there's coordinated attacks, you know, from Reddit or any of this nonsense, It's like, yeah, you guys didn't kill me, and in many ways you made me stronger, so I thank you for it.
So I guess you live and learn.
I guess that's the point.
All right, thank you for the question.
Janelle, let's see.
What are some of your all-time favorite bits or jokes from comedians, movies, or TV shows?
Well, I've talked about this a little bit, that the thing that really got me into comedy, I mean, I remember, 1983, I'm seven years old, watching TV, and I saw Bill Cosby himself, and it's, it's, I still think I know that he's one of the biggest serial rapists of all times, nobody's perfect.
But I was watching it, and you may remember the special.
He's got that great color, sort of reddish background.
He's in a brown suit.
He's sitting on the stool, and he does the chocolate cake routine.
And the dentist is the really famous one, and a bunch of others.
And I thought it was so funny.
I couldn't believe that anything could be that funny.
It was, you know, that laugh when your stomach, the muscles are, you're in pain, you're dying on the floor.
And I probably didn't even understand half of the things he was talking about.
unidentified
But just the way he spoke, Chocolate cake and the dentist and the whole thing.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Like, Theo.
Like, I just thought it was the funniest, greatest thing ever.
And that really is what got me into comedy in the first place.
But a couple of funny bits.
I mean, Naked Gun, the original, is the funniest movie of all time.
We watched it again about two months ago.
It is the funniest movie.
It's airplane humor perfected.
You know, that sort of slapstick thing.
Airplane got like 80% of the way, naked gun, in my opinion, just perfected.
I remember seeing it in the movie theater, also dying in pain.
A guy sitting in front of me in the movie theater, I was sitting in an aisle seat, a fat man fell out of his seat laughing.
So that, there's a clip that I've been posting every now and again now on Twitter of a movie called See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Hear No Evil, See No Evil, With Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.
And there's a great scene right at the beginning of the movie where Richard Pryor plays a black man and he's on the subway with his sister.
He plays a black man.
He plays a blind man.
Did I just say he plays a black man?
Now I'm gonna be cancelled.
Here we go.
He plays a blind man and his sister says something and he gets up and he says, I'm not white.
And he does this whole thing thinking that, because he was blind, he was a white man.
It's actually totally hilarious.
What are some of the other great things?
I mean, there's another question about this I'll get to further, but like,
Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld and some of that kind of stuff.
Yeah, it's funny because now, we're all trapped in our houses or at least less,
but still to some degree.
The two things that I've watched, we watched all of The Sopranos, which I had seen from beginning to end, but David had never seen it all, and it's perfection.
There's not a bad episode.
There's not one throwaway episode.
It's absolute perfection.
There's so much truth in there.
There's a lot of interesting stuff about social justice in there, too.
Tony was not a fan of it, by the way.
And living to a certain code and human imperfections and all that stuff.
And right now we are in, I believe we're about to start season three of Handmaid's Tale,
which actually I've been wanting to talk about a little bit.
I won't blow anything about Handmaid's Tale, but when it came out about two or three years ago, it was sort of at the beginning of the Trump presidency, and I kept seeing all these pieces online and people on Twitter saying, this is Trump's America, and we're gonna enslave women, and da-da-da-da-do, and no one's gonna be talking anymore in censorship and all this stuff.
And it's like, now I'm watching it, and it's like, no, this is literally what the progressives and the left and the Marxists and these lunatic BLM, Antifa people, this is what they're bringing, this silence and political correctness and violence and all of this stuff, this is what they are ushering in.
So the fact that people thought it was Trump and the scary conservatives, That we're going to have women in chains again and all this stuff.
It's like, you guys got this whole freaking thing backwards.
So if you haven't seen The Handmaid's Tale and you want to watch a piece of fiction that is actually relevant to what's going on, but not in the way that the mainstream media or that just the general Twitterati will tell you, check out The Handmaid's Tale.
It's not very funny though.
That is one of the things.
A lot of rape.
A lot of rape.
Okay, Robert says, given all the recent chaos and bad polls and recognizing that this is 2020 and the months to November could see things radically shift 15 times, how do you think the election is gonna go?
Well, I think the middle part of your question is the key part.
No one wants to be in the prediction game ever.
It usually does not work out well.
I've had a pretty freaking good track record on predictions, especially on the sort of the big level, the high level stuff.
Um, but yes, not only can anything happen, but like we're in a particularly anything can happen and the media can pretend anything happened moment.
So it's not just what reality is, it's what the media will let us see with reality.
So like with Corona right now...
I think one of the interesting things is it does sound like there is starting to be some sort of a bump, which basically everybody said, by the way.
You know, didn't matter where you were, left, right, whatever else, the people that were calling for opening up were not denying that that could cause a bump.
They were saying, well, we just can't.
Stay locked down forever, so we have to try it and see what happens.
And the people that wanted us locked down forever were saying, oh, there's gonna be a bump either way.
So nobody has like a perfect crystal ball relative to what's gonna happen.
I think part of the exhaustion of the whole thing is nobody knows who to trust, right?
We're supposed to wear masks, we shouldn't wear masks.
Fauci says this, the WHO says this.
You know, originally we were supposed to flatten the curve, which we did everywhere.
Now we're continuing lockdowns.
Now Washington State wants you in a mask all the time.
My brother-in-law just left Washington, stayed wisely with his girlfriend.
So I think we have an issue related to just...
The trust level, like there's the reality level of whatever is real related to Corona, whatever is real related to protests and violence and all that stuff.
And then there's the media layer that that's the filter that then gets to us.
So it's like depending on if you watch MSNBC or Fox or YouTube or whatever, like your filter is going to be so different than somebody else's.
That it's almost like we're living in multiple realities, right?
Like, so if you watch my show, let's say you watch my show, you listen to some Shapiro, you watch a Rogan every now and again, you know, some of the online stuff, and then pick, take that type of person.
Now, it doesn't mean we're all right about everything, but take that type of person.
You'll listen to some Jordan Peterson lectures, whatever that is.
Now imagine if you're just somebody that listens to whatever lefty YouTube is, or MSNBC, or whatever.
Like, your reality is so different that it's like you're gonna think you're getting the same information, but you're not.
And I think that, I'm more concerned about that than the specifics of the virus.
Like, we've done a pretty good job, right?
No hospital was overrun, as far as I know.
That doesn't mean that some of them weren't strained.
I have a friend who's a doctor that was at a pretty strained hospital.
but none of them were overrun.
We don't have millions and millions of young sick people.
Older people got sick and older people died.
And by the way, Andrew Cuomo in New York, you know, sent a lot of older sick people
back into nursing homes and tons of them died.
And then he's on that clown show CNN yesterday or the day before with his brother.
And they pretend like it's like, it's like a bad comedy skit with the two of them
and their spray tans are just seen, both of them.
But they're talking about what a great job Andrew Cuomo did and how much better than Florida.
And it's, my numbers are not gonna be right here.
So maybe my guys could check it, but it's something like 33,000 people have died in New York
and 3000 have died in Florida.
Can someone check those numbers for me?
And it's like, Now, I get the populations are different, population centers are different, all that stuff.
But like, oh, you did such a great job.
And being interviewed by his brother, it's all just kind of gross.
So I think in terms of predictions, it's like, yeah, could we have a sudden spike in September?
Or not even a spike, but a media-concocted spike?
and what's gonna happen with mail-in voting.
I mean, this whole mail-in voting thing is so insane.
So basically every Democrat is suddenly for it.
And it's like between the riots, the protests, the pandemic, the general unease about everything,
and suddenly we're also going to check, we're also gonna change how we do our voting.
Everyone knows that the only reason the Democrats want it is because they're going to figure out how to fix it that way.
And as long as I'm going down that road, this idea of mostly virtual convention that the Democrats are going to have, that's partly corona-related, but it's also because they want to hide Biden.
They can't have him out there.
The guy obviously has cognitive decline.
We all know it.
But there's something even worse than that.
Which is they don't want a convention because their base, which is these Marxists and lunatics and Antifa people and all that, they're gonna burn down the freaking convention.
They were trying to burn it down a couple years ago.
You didn't see much about that on mainstream media because they didn't want to show you that it could be that side that's violent, right?
It's only the scary white supremacist Trump supporters that nobody can find.
unidentified
So...
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Man, so how do you predict all this stuff?
Like, I don't even, I've been saying for a while, I still am not convinced Biden is gonna be the nominee.
I mean, I don't think he's, I don't, even if he is the person that is going to run against Trump for sure, I mean, get the Democratic nomination and go ahead, I don't think he's really the nominee.
Like, it's the party leaders at the DNC who are just pushing out this old man that they can control, and they're just hoping that he can speak long enough to make it through.
But they've been hiding him out, because they know that's a disaster.
But in effect, I think you could make an argument that the Marxists and the Bernie progressives and just that awful crew of people, I think my guys might be giving me some numbers here.
Guys, can you get me the numbers on Florida and New York before I move too far?
The Florida and New York corona death rates.
I think in many ways you could argue that the Bernie crew did actually win, because all of the riots and the protests and all that, that's what they wanted, right?
That is what they wanted.
The Bernie people have been saying this on Twitter all the time.
Lefties, this is what they want.
They didn't want to win honestly.
They wanted to win however they could win.
And they will gladly burn down the system.
Let's not forget that Pete Buttigieg, who has no opinions about anything.
He's the most vanilla nothing.
He was saying in that last debate, you can vote for Bernie, but he wants to burn the system down.
Well, now they're doing it.
So all of these rioters and all that, they're just doing the Democrats dirty work.
That doesn't mean that every Democrat is bad.
It doesn't mean that every lefty is bad, but they have nobody.
Nobody that can stand up to this thing, the only guy who maybe could have done it, would have been Obama.
That Obama could have just come out and been like, no, I believe in law and order, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Which, by the way, would have been protecting his legacy, because in many ways, when they're telling you how racist and awful and imperial and blah, blah, blah, that America is, it's like, oh, well, he was president for eight years, so the whole thing, Biden's running now, On this idea that America is so evil.
Well, America didn't just become evil in the three years of Trump, right?
Actually, if you remove the last few months of riots and corona, try to think back to the three years before.
Everything was actually pretty good.
Now, the media was telling you that we were Russia and Ukraine and making up things all the time that all always turned out to be wrong.
World War III, we killed Soleimani.
Net neutrality, we're all gonna die.
But really, if you're voting for Biden because you think America's evil, it's like, that's a serious freakin' condemnation of Obama, so you're really condemning a Biden.
This has very little to do with Trump.
So it's a really, I think they're in, the whole thing's a disaster.
They're gonna pick some progressive, maybe Elizabeth Warren, who knows.
I mean, I guess they have to go with a minority woman because the whole thing's so stupid.
So they'll pick somebody, and it's like, that's probably who the president is, if it's not the party leaders.
So in terms of predictions of the whole damn thing, I mean, I still think that if you just look back at 2016, like, is there anyone that's...
that voted for Trump that's suddenly gonna be like, I've decided to vote for the radical lefties.
I was wrong about his hair and his color of his skin and the tweets.
I'm voting for the radical lefties.
Like, I don't think there's anybody.
Are there people who are so frustrated with what the left has become that they're not gonna do it publicly, but they are gonna vote for Trump because he wants to keep the wheels on capitalism and America and all that?
I do think plenty of those people exist.
I'm meeting them on the streets in L.A., believe it or not.
My guess is Trump wins, but now it's of course about voter turnout, this mail-in-ballot stuff, how Corona's gonna affect all this.
And it's like, by the way, now there's all these think pieces and the usual political hill nonsense about, will Trump leave if he loses?
And it's like, you guys didn't accept the results of the election last time.
You have spent every second trying to topple this guy with fake investigations and a gajillion other things.
So, you know.
You get it, you guys get it.
All right, I got some updated numbers on COVID.
So in Florida, there were 114,000 cases and 3,300 deaths.
14,000 cases and 3,300 deaths.
In New York, there were 390,000 cases.
So that's over three times as more, three times more cases.
And there were 24,800 deaths.
That's about five, that's about what?
Seven times the amount of deaths.
And yet you've got Chris Cuomo telling Andrew Cuomo what an amazing job he's done.
Now, I'm not perfectly equating the populations and where they're all centralized and all of that stuff, but it's just silly propaganda.
I mean, watching CNN is basically watching the WWE.
They're just poorly written.
Skits, that's it.
Okay, Lauren says, is there someone you haven't interviewed that you really wish you could to make happen?
unidentified
Why?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
I've answered this one a couple times.
So my usual answer is Bill Maher because I think he's basically sort of the last sort of mainstream, sane, lefty voice, you know, good on free speech.
He has, you know, a touch of Trump derangement syndrome, more than a touch.
But, you know, I think he's a good old-fashioned liberal.
Now, obviously, I've become more right than he is, let's say, more libertarian than he is, although I think, in essence, he really is just a libertarian who wants to smoke pot and, you know, bang chicks and do whatever it is that he does.
And I think that's great.
That's his right to do it.
I would love to have that conversation with him about what has happened to the left, what has happened to the last liberals who are all gone.
You know, one of the interesting things is I was supposed to be on Real Time with Bill Maher, I think on May 28th, so almost a month ago today, actually, and they canceled me, and I knew when we got booked, I was supposed to be on for the book, and we got booked, I was like, something is gonna happen, and it just ain't gonna happen, because I wanted to do it my whole life.
When I started doing stand-up in 98, Long time ago.
God, that's a long time ago.
I wanted to be on Politically Incorrect, which was Bill Maher's ABC show that eventually became Real Time.
So I've wanted to, I've chatted with him privately two or three times, very, very small conversations.
Actually, I will tell you this.
I don't think I've ever said this publicly before, but it's my birthday.
I'm opening up to you good people.
I met Bill Maher at a party once about five years ago.
And I introduced myself as Dave Rubin, I'm a comic, I have a show, blah, blah, blah.
And I think he had heard about me from a few of our mutual friends.
And I said, Bill, you gotta watch out for the left.
They're the ones that are gonna come for ya.
And he goes in perfect sort of like smug Bill Marsalis, like, nah, I got the left!
I don't have to worry about that.
And whatever, the conversation went on for another minute and that's it.
And it's like, who do you guys think is gonna take out Bill Maher?
When they come to take out Bill Maher, who's gonna do it?
Is it gonna be the conservatives, the Trump supporters, the people on the right who take out Bill Maher?
No, because actually those are the ones that defend Bill Maher all the time.
Every time Bill Maher is a clip go viral, it's a bunch of conservatives going, you know, I disagree with Bill a lot, but he's getting it right on this.
Who's always trying to cancel Bill Maher?
It's the freaking crazy bananas lefties.
So I think I was ahead of seeing the thing that we now all see, and I would love to talk to him about that.
But since I always answer that question with Bill Maher, who would I love to talk to?
You know who I would love to talk to, who I do text with every now and again, is my favorite basketball player of all time, who, oh, I was gonna say my basketball here is signed by him, but that's in the house.
Clyde Drexler, he was a player on the Blazers in the, Late 80s, early 90s, eventually won a championship with the Rockets.
And you know, they just did this last dance thing on ESPN about Michael Jordan.
And Jordan and Clyde, Clyde was always sort of number two to Jordan for those years, and they played the same position.
And Jordan just annihilated everybody, right?
He annihilated Magic the first year, and he annihilated Clyde the second year, and Barkley the third championship, and Peyton for the fourth, and Malone and Stockton for the fifth and sixth.
He just took out everybody.
But Clyde was right there playing the same position, was never quite as good as Jordan.
Nobody is, right?
But Jordan was pretty disrespectful to him in the last dance thing, and I would love to talk to To Clyde about that.
I know it's like a little offshoot of what I normally do around here, but I think that would be interesting.
Let's see.
We did the thoughts of life.
A couple things about the election.
So there's a lot about the election.
What's your favorite album, if not some of your favorites?
So I'll give you a couple things and then I'll tell you a specific album.
So generally lately, so because I've worked from home for years, But now, like, we're all working from home.
I find, if you're working from home and you're struggling, or just to keep, like, the energy up, or whatever it is, like, you're missing human interaction or whatever, I found a channel on Spotify by a band called Schwoarzenfunk.
I have no idea who these guys are.
Schwarz, S-C-H-W-A-R-Z and funk, F-U-N-K.
And it's sort of all like ambient, chill music.
And they've got about 10 albums on there.
And you can pick a whole bunch of different ones.
I like the departure sessions in the morning.
I usually just click play on that, get it going throughout the whole house.
It's a nice way to start the day.
And then they have a couple, I think they're called diamond albums.
There's like a ruby diamond, an emerald diamond, and a blue diamond.
The ruby diamond, the red one, is just great for sort of afternoon, if you just want some afternoon ambiance.
So I really like chill and ambient stuff during the day.
I don't want to hear words in my music during the day because I'm talking all the time,
I'm listening to people talk all the time.
I find it hard to work and hear other people talking or singing, so that, I've been really big on that lately.
I also found, somebody found this band, this synth wave band, I mentioned doing stand up once,
that I've really been into synth wave lately and somebody found this band, The Midnight,
who I freaking absolutely love and they have, they do have words in their songs,
but there's instrumental versions of a bunch of their stuff, they're called The Midnight.
And, but, really, if I'm listening to like, if it's at night and we're cooking, we're eating,
we have friends over, like, I'm old school.
I love Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.
The last two concerts that I've been to were Frankie Valli at 85 years old.
I just love it.
So my favorite album right now, like, if I was playing one album, Tonight.
There's a Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons Greatest Hits live in Jersey, where they go back home to Jersey.
And they do a couple medleys where they don't do the full songs, but they just do them in succession with each other.
And it's just great.
And it's like, man, Frankie Valli, that voice.
He was also in Sopranos for a couple episodes, which I had completely forgot about.
But we do a lot of Sinatra, a lot of Dean Martin, I love the old crooners.
And then like for dinner parties, again, I don't like if you're talking, I don't like a lot of talking in the music.
So if we're sitting down with people for dinner, I do like Count Basie or Duke Ellington, that kind of stuff.
I am old school, what can I tell you?
44 years old.
A wish, a lesson, and a resolution for this year.
Wow, that's a good one.
A wish.
Well, my wish for sure is that we can start resetting this thing.
And I do sense that underneath the craziness right now, there are a lot of you guys that are getting a little bit braver.
You're starting to speak up a little bit more.
You realize that your silence only gives room to the bad actors and the bad ideas.
And so my wish is that We get a little braver and we start pushing back on this nonsense.
That's the wish.
A lesson?
I guess a lesson that I've learned?
Well, I guess this is sort of what I said before, but just do something.
Just do something.
Whatever it is you think you're supposed to do, start doing it.
Don't be afraid.
If you want to try stand-up, try that.
If you want to learn how to play the drums, try it.
If you want to learn how to code, learn to code!
Whatever you want to do, just get out there and start doing it.
In many ways, it's like the only lesson in life.
Just go and do something.
Because if you do it, and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, and you fail, That will be better than not having done it, right?
It's better to have loved and lost than never have loved at all.
Do it!
Do it!
And I guarantee you this, like, there were many times in my career where I was like, I don't know how much longer I can do this, it's not working out the way I wanted, or this didn't happen, or that didn't happen, or my friend got this gig and I didn't get that, or all those things.
But if you just keep doing it, and then every time you get to that precipice, that moment, that cliff, where you're like, I don't know if I can take it anymore, If you just keep going, the cliff keeps moving.
The cliff keeps moving.
So there are cliffs in my future for sure.
And hopefully I can just keep playing through them.
You know, that's it.
And a resolution... I guess a resolution for me will be that I will be able That I'll be able to uphold the ideals that I talk about here.
You know, in many ways it's a lot easier to do, to be respectful and decent and open and honest and all that stuff.
It's a lot easier to do when I'm interviewing somebody, whether it's by Skype or if somebody's in here, versus the simplicity of social media, the simplicity of Twitter where you go after people and you, you know, Firebomb somebody on Twitter, all of that stuff.
And I try not to do it too much, and then sometimes I do.
Some loser person, a Daily Beast person, went after me yesterday because I said I agree with Tucker Carlson on his monologue from yesterday, which was fantastic.
So I tweeted something back, and I was trying to be kind of funny.
I was like, well, I totally agree with Tucker, and so does Clyde.
And I took a picture of Clyde.
And as you guys probably know from some of the videos and pictures you've seen of Clyde, Clyde has a huge scar on his head right here, and there's some scar tissue behind that.
And we don't know exactly what it's from, because he was found on the streets, abandoned, and he was obviously either, the first vet said he thought it was a pretty severe, intentional cigarette burn, but it could be much worse.
I mean, it could have been that he was actually stabbed, so he has a lot of scar tissue.
Anyway, I post this picture and all these tolerant lefties are telling me that I abused my dog
and what's wrong with him and all this shit.
And then I did retweet a couple of them saying, oh, well, you know, actually he was abandoned
and due to be killed that day, he was gonna be put down at the shelter and we adopted him
and he's living a pretty good life right now.
Like what's wrong with you?
That sort of thing.
I did it to a couple of people.
And it's like, yeah, it's good to tell the story about him and whatever and fight back
when people are just saying awful things, as if I abused my dog or whatever.
But maybe just a resolution would be just to try to let some of that stuff just go instead of diving into it too much.
But that's one of those things where we all have these moments where there are moments in life where you can let a lot of stuff just roll off your back and then there's other moments where you where you want to fight back more.
So there you go.
unidentified
Let's see.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Let's see.
Dave, which of the following is most likely for you and your husband?
One, we're staying in California.
Two, we're moving to Texas.
Three, we're moving to Florida.
All right.
All right, people.
Let me have a sip of coffee before I answer.
We've done a lot of thinking about this.
We've done a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of thinking about this.
I've been talking about it.
I've been tweeting about it.
I've got 400 billion people, roughly, in Texas that are welcoming me and want to show me around and help me get guns and build the fort and the whole thing.
I've always loved Florida.
My folks have a little place in Florida that I've always loved to go to.
The summers can be pretty brutal, but you can always get out of there for the summers.
Financially, it would make way more sense to be in Texas with no state income tax or Florida with no state income tax than California with our 13% on top of whatever LA's is.
We've been talking about it for two months now and trying to figure out what we're going to do.
I think that the decision is that we're going to fight it out here, at least for a couple of years.
I don't want to give up on California.
I mean that sort of at the personal level.
I'm not a quitter.
And I meet too many people.
I'm meeting people on the streets right now.
I'm telling you, I'm meeting people on my street who are coming up to me going, Dave, I've been a lefty my whole life.
This place is out of control now.
Maybe we have to do something.
I'm getting a lot of messages from people that want to figure out how to fix it here.
You know, California was not always a progressive dystopia.
Ronald Reagan was the governor.
of California, okay?
He was more lefty at the time, but the point is that there is a chance
that some of this stuff could be reset.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was a Republican governor of California not too long ago.
So I think there is a chance.
So I wanna stay and fight for a couple of years.
I really do.
I don't wanna flee.
I also think that beyond me, it's like the message that I would be sending to people.
You know, I talk about the foot vote all the time.
If you don't like what's happening in your state, you gotta go to another state.
But you know, if all of the good people leave California, go to Texas, well, first off, we know what happens.
These blue people go to red states and then they turn them blue.
So if I was you, Texas, I'd be building a wall and not letting any Californians in.
Or at least make them sign something.
I'm pretty sure that would be a good idea.
Um, but putting that aside for a sec, I, you know, what will America be if, if we really, really split into just red states versus just blue states?
Because all the populations transfer so that it's just this and just that.
It's like we will not have anything close to national cohesion.
So if you think That we're struggling right now when it comes to national cohesion.
It could get much, much, much, much worse.
I think you always need a healthy opposition, and I probably will never be really in the majority here, but I do wanna fight it out for a little bit longer.
I know that's gonna disappoint my people in Texas, but that is it.
Favorite 90s show.
Also a request for a birthday dance party, perhaps with your pup.
I don't know if the dance party's gonna happen.
Favorite 90s show.
I mean, Seinfeld debuted in 89, I think end of 89, and it lasted until 98.
It's the best sitcom ever, period.
I mean, I don't think there's anything close.
There's, as I said before about The Sopranos, there's virtually no throwaway episode in Seinfeld.
It's just perfect.
You know, the clip, I posted a clip this last week or two weeks ago about the blackout meme and that everyone was being forced into The blackout meme, which was exactly, who won't wear the ribbon, from the AIDS march in Seinfeld, when Kramer goes to the march, so he's doing the right thing, but then he just doesn't wanna wear the ribbon, and then what happens?
The tolerant people at the AIDS march beat the crap out of him.
That's very much what happened with our blackout meme.
It wasn't just that you didn't, if you didn't post it, you were okay.
If you didn't post it, we were gonna destroy you too.
There's just so many.
It really is comedy perfection.
You know, I love Curb, too.
That's obviously not 90s.
And of course, I always have to give a shout out to my Golden Girls, although I consider that more of an 80s show because it debuted in 85, went off the air in May of 92.
I remember watching it and I had tears in my eyes.
Chris says, if you could pick one Star Wars film, which would it be?
Chris, I'm going to go controversial on you.
I think legally I have to answer one Star Wars question during all of these livestreams.
I'm going to say Revenge of the Sith.
The prequels.
You guys all know my feelings on this so I won't belabor the point but I have been saying for years the prequels are going to be looked back at better and better and better as time goes on.
I think a lot of people are waking up to it.
Sith is a pretty perfect movie, minus a little bit of stiff acting.
But seeing the culmination of what Palpatine's plan was, watching Anakin turn to the dark side, understanding what Order 66 was.
Palpatine, I mean, this idea that you create a war and then shut down one of the sides as you've accumulated power, it's such a great political story that nobody really talks about.
We only talk about Star Wars related to the Force.
So I'm gonna say Revenge of the Sith.
I'll also say one other quick thing on Star Wars.
You know, the last three were pretty terrible.
Force Awakens I liked, the middle one was so bad that Rise of Skywalker, then just had to clean it up and J.J.
did whatever he could do.
Oh, by the way, speaking of J.J.
Abrams, did you see his company, whatever his production company is, they just released this handbook on how to fight white supremacy and have diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
And it's the worst social justice BS nonsense.
It's like, J.J., apparently you're hiring an awful lot of racist people I don't need a diversity and inclusion workforce for my people.
I don't hire racist people.
Everybody's fine here, you know?
So, but anyway, putting that aside.
But, you know, I think one of the marks of a good movie is if you watch it, the more you watch it, the more you can learn something in it.
So, for example, we did a Rubin Report movie day, movie afternoon.
We did the movie Contact with Jodie Foster.
It's a book, the book originally was written by Carl Sagan.
And I've seen it many times, and usually I find when I watch that movie there's a little something I can learn more each time about it.
And that's what a good movie does.
If you watch The Godfather, you can watch it 20 times, you will learn a little bit more, a little more intricacies about the characters, the looks, everything will make it richer and richer and richer.
The more you watch the last three Star Wars, the worse they get.
Because Force Awakens, which on its own was good, well then it gets ruined by all of the stuff in The Last Jedi, and then J.J.' 's just cleaning it up.
But one of the things that he did that was terrible, I think, in Rise of Skywalker, was every time you're about to have an emotional moment, they take it away from you.
So when Rey crashes the space cruiser with Force Lightning, Well, you think Chewbacca's dead.
That's a real moment.
Nobody wants Chewbacca to be dead.
That is a sad moment and it feels like an ending of Star Wars.
Chewbacca's gonna die.
Five minutes later, oh, Chewbacca happened to be in another cruiser that we didn't see.
C-3PO, his memory is wiped out.
You think, oh my God, this is the end of C-3PO.
He's a robot, if he doesn't have memory, that's it, he's done.
Then his memory starts coming back.
So, every time there's an emotional moment, they take away the emotion five minutes later, but what that does is, when you now see the movie the second time, what's supposed to be emotional is reverse emotional.
There's no emotion to it, because you're like, oh, that thing that I'm watching happen?
It doesn't happen.
So I think they just mucked up the whole thing.
I have no idea how they get out of it.
However, I did watch the last season of Clone Wars and it was freaking spectacular.
And maybe that's just what the future of Star Wars has to be.
It has to be more graphic animation and going deep into that part of the universe.
But what they did with Darth Maul and with Ahsoka, it was spectacular.
Okay!
Let's see.
Happy birthday, Dave.
Keep doing what you're doing.
Love your show.
Will you go on Joe Rogan's podcast?
And will you have libertarian presidential VP candidate on your show before the election?
Will I go on Rogan's podcast?
I asked him and our PR people asked him about a bajillion times to go on for my book.
We did not get a response as far as I know.
So I don't know what happened there.
It's a little weird for me to say that publicly.
I don't know what happened.
And will I, oh yeah, Jo Jorgensen, who's the Libertarian candidate, we've reached out to her people a zillion times, and in very Libertarian fashion, we're not getting a great response.
I don't know what's happened in there.
But yes, Jo, if you're watching this, I'd love to have you on.
Let's talk about Libertarianism, zippity-dippity.
All right, there's a lot of stuff here.
What is a favorite non-political memory of yours?
So what's a favorite memory?
Favorite memory, favorite memory, favorite memory.
Trying to think of like a good childhood, like what's a great childhood memory.
unidentified
[BLANK_AUDIO]
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
I got a good one.
I remember going to Disney, is it Disney World or Disneyland?
Whichever one's in Miami, in Orlando, in Florida.
We went when I was about 12 years old, my brother was about 9, my sister was probably like 4.
And they do the big shows where they grab people out of the audience and they grabbed me and my brother and my sister and we were with some family friends.
They grabbed basically the whole crew of kids and they dressed us up and we were Gilligan's Island and you're in front of like 500 people and I was Gilligan and we're on a boat and they're yelling at you what to do and people are laughing at you and they've got water raining down on you because the boat's gonna crash and they got fake lightning and I'm wearing the hat and I'm Gilligan with the shirt and the whole thing.
I never really thought about it until just now, but I guess maybe that was one of the first times I realized I like laughter.
I like when people laugh.
Because I remember I was kind of hamming it up in the boat.
And it was just like, I just loved everything about not only Disney World and Epcot and Universal Studios, like seeing how it's all made and the sound effects and all the cool technical stuff that goes behind that.
I always liked it.
Now I live very close to Universal, which every time people In the old days, when you used to be able to leave your
house I would take people, people would visit me
and then I would take them out, say to the beach or to Universal Studios or even to Ikea
and we would go out and do things.
We don't do that as often these days, but I love going there, I love all that stuff.
I'm not a huge ride guy.
I get kind of motion sickness on the hardcore roller coasters so I hate roller coasters,
but I will plow through for the other stuff.
So at Universal they've got an awesome Transformers ride, as bad as the Transformers movies are,
the ride is so cool.
And I had a fan that got us down to Star Wars, the new Star Wars at Disney here for an advanced thing.
And although it actually wasn't great, I just love everything behind it.
I just love that they build these things and all of that good stuff.
Let's see.
To the man who changed my life, happy birthday.
Not one moment has impacted my life more than when I came across your interview with DeFranco, Phil DeFranco.
I was hooked from there.
My red pill is all due to you and I'm eternally thankful.
Have a wonderful day filled with nothing but love and positivity.
Stay off Twitter, it'll help, I promise you I will.
Birthday question, what's your favorite cake flavor?
In case someone wants to make you a cake and you spell flavor, F-L-A-V-O-U-R, so I know you're British, very fancy.
What's my favorite cake?
Flavor, well I can tell you this, I'm going out with friends tonight and I know if I'm involved in the choosing of the dessert, although maybe they'll beat me to the punch, I always go for like a, you give me like a serious chocolate lava, gooey, chocolatey mess, I am very, very happy.
But, that being said, cake is not my favorite dessert.
Ice cream.
I love ice cream.
I could eat ice cream every day.
I don't eat ice cream every day, but I absolutely could.
You give me a good, like, serious mint chocolate chip cookie dough... cookies and cream, really.
I love ice cream and I wish I was eating ice cream right now.
Steven, happy birthday, Dave.
Thank you for being a positive influence in the lives of so many people.
My question is, are you and David planning more interviews together?
So some of you guys may have seen this.
David interviewed me for an hour, which we posted as an exclusive for people that pre-ordered Don't Burn This Book, but we did post one 12-minute clip of it on the channel, which you guys can find, and what we talked about in that clip was meeting Trump when we met Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and he realized we were gay, and he stood up, and he shook our hands, and he was like, I don't give a shit!
Nobody gives a shit!
And then David and Melania hung out for a little bit and then I had Trump.
I was having dinner with Trump Jr.
and he got pulled away and then I had a few minutes just with Trump and he was just totally nice and friendly and...
I've told this before, but I said to him, it's an honor to meet you, Mr. President.
And he looked at me like, yeah, you can call me Don.
He couldn't have cared less.
But there's a full interview where we talk about how we met and what it's been like.
And actually, I should mention this, today is my birthday, June 26th.
David and I actually met on my birthday today, 10 years ago.
It was at the Gay Pride Parade, in fact.
And I actually remember the second he walked into the room.
June 26th is a good one for me.
Well, first off, Clyde's freaking out right now because my staff is here today, so we've got a bunch of people in the house, and we usually now, because we're doing stuff still remote, mostly, we don't have a lot of people in the house.
So the fact that there's people in the house, right before we started the live stream,
David looked at me, he said, "Look at Clyde's eyes."
His eyes are dilated, like he just did a whole bunch of mushrooms.
Like he is so overly stimulated right now, but he has been getting trained for the last month.
We've had a dog trainer here.
And the guy did an amazing job, 'cause Clyde was getting a little nutty, a lot of barking,
chewing on literally everything.
Like, you know, he ate the first copy of Don't Burn This Book.
I mean, the guy was just plowing through everything, every kind of food, pizza boxes, whatever he could find.
But the training actually worked.
And now he's, like, totally cool.
He's got a lot of energy.
You know, he's won.
He's got a lot of energy.
Did cartoons and movies from your youth play any role in the development of your personal principles?
I love that question!
All right, cartoons from my youth, I mean, the big two would be Transformers and G.I.
Joe.
I suppose they probably did.
Well, look, G.I.
Joe, now I know, and knowing is half the battle, right?
That was the PSA that they did after the thing, and it's like, yeah, if you know about something, Then that is, actually, that's probably about 80% of the battle.
I guess that doesn't sound as clean.
But I loved G.I.
Joe.
I loved Transformers.
Had all, you know, all the toys.
I didn't have all the toys.
I had a lot of the toys.
I still got Soundwave.
I posted a picture of Soundwave the other day.
I've got my old school Soundwave with Ravage in there.
Ravage was the panther that was in Soundwave's chest.
I've got an old Storm Shadow, which was one of the hardest G.I.
Joe characters to find.
Got my little Storm Shadow.
His crotch is blown out.
That happened with a lot of the G.I.
Joes and sometimes the rubber band would get whatever, but he has no nuts, basically.
But I've got Storm Shadow and I've got Soundwave and I've got a Boba Fett, an original Boba Fett over there.
But did those things shape me in any way?
I don't know, but I will tell you this.
I remember seeing the Transformers movie.
Can one of my guys do a check?
What year did the original Transformers movie come out, the cartoon movie?
I'm guessing it was probably around 88, something like that?
No, no, maybe 86?
Can we get a check on that, guys?
The original Transformers cartoon movie.
And I went to see it with my, my grandma took me.
And she took me and my brother, and we go, and I'm probably 11 or so when we get the year on that, and so we go, we watch it, and if you remember this movie, it is nothing like the Michael Bay Transformer movies.
First off, it's a cartoon.
The soundtrack is amazing.
It is like 80s hardcore rock.
It's so cool.
The animation, they really upped it, and it's all hand animation, which is awesome.
But in the movie, Optimus Prime dies right at the beginning of the movie.
And I remember crying in the movie theater.
And I remember looking at my brother and crying.
And he's crying.
And we're crying.
Optimus Prime died.
I remember we got out and I was still crying at the end because they referenced something about Optimus at the end.
And I remember, whatever it was, 11 years old, I remember thinking I should not be seen crying.
I didn't want my grandma to see me crying.
If there were other kids, everybody walked out.
1986, I was right, so I was 10 years old, walked out of there crying.
That is not really relevant to what I learned about the movie.
What did I learn from the lessons?
Well, you gotta fight for what you believe in.
That's what Optimus Prime did.
That's what Duke and the G.I.
Joe people did.
They fought for what they thought was right.
Versus Megatron and Cobra Commander.
Because what were Megatron and Cobra Commander always doing?
They always wanted all the power.
And what did they decide to do if they couldn't get the power?
Almost every episode of G.I.
Joe ended like this.
Cobra Commander being like, if I can't have it, nobody can!
And that's basically what the modern left is.
If it's not exactly how they want it, they're gonna burn down the whole thing.
And that's what Cobra Commander would do.
They'd be trying to do something with their weather machine or their cloning system or some crazy idea that they had, much like the bananas ideas of the Marxists.
And if they couldn't get it exactly as they wanted, they'd burn down the whole system.
So I guess I did learn a little something from Optimus Prime and Duke and the Joes.
Um, let's see.
I'm trying to avoid some of the purely political ones.
Ah, here's just a fun quick one.
Who's your favorite Seinfeld character, excluding Jerry?
Well, Jerry's definitely not my favorite character.
I mean, I think, I go in phases with all four of them where I'm like, man, I just love this one right now, Jerry.
Cramer or George or Elaine.
But Frank Costanza, who actually just passed away, Jerry Stiller, passed away about a month or two ago.
He was, I think, in his late 90s.
Ben Stiller's father, of course, and his wife, Anne Mira, they were a comedy duo in the 50s and 60s.
And I bumped into Jerry a couple times.
We used to live a block or two away on the Upper West Side.
I would see him on the street.
We would talk about comedy.
He was so nice and friendly and loving and just a good, good, good, good man.
But every, he stole every freaking scene he was in in Seinfeld.
Every single scene.
Yeah, I've seen.
How can alternative platforms like yours capture the attention of those
persuadable people in the middle?
It's a great question because I think what we're seeing right now is,
so I'll talk about locals in a sec, but Parler is gaining some traction right now,
and it's really interesting because, you know, unlike Gab, which Gab took a lot of the trolls
and all that stuff, and I'm not knocking Gab in any way, and I think in many ways what they've built
technologically is great, but what happened was it was maybe a little early in the game,
and then the media just goes on it to destroy it, and then people are afraid of getting on there.
So the gab thing's not gonna work.
Parler now seems to be getting some mainstream people, generally people that lean right.
I was leaning left there, but that leaned this way.
But they're getting some real people.
I just saw Rick Grinnell just got on there.
It's funded, at least partly, by Dan Bongino.
I just got the At Rubin Report handle on there.
There was someone impersonating me, and I had thousands of followers, so they just gave me that.
I haven't posted anything there yet.
But seeing that something is gaining steam, whether it's gonna ultimately work,
whether the idea of replacing Twitter is exactly what the right answer is,
whether having parallel things is good or bad, or whether this actually just siphons us off
and gets us more in our echo chamber, I don't know the answer to any of that.
Nobody knows the answer to any of that.
But I think having some competitive things out there is good and showing people, modeling for people that we can build things on our own that won't be reliant on big tech overlords.
These are all good things.
I actually just messaged Bongino this morning because we've built something that is seriously awesome with locals and it is hugely exploding right now because people are realizing you can't be reliant on big tech.
So while Parler is basically a Twitter clone, and that's great, completely great, What we're doing with Locals is we're giving you tools to build an online community for yourself.
So if you want a place where it's you're owning the video, you're owning the audio, you're owning the pictures, the content, the user data, the Locals app, if you go just search Locals.com in the iOS store or an Android Play and you can download the app for free, you can jump between communities, you can send push notifications to your to your audience.
We built something that's real, and you can monetize it through subscription.
I mean, we built something that's really slick.
But I just emailed Bongino, 'cause I'm like, there might be some ways we could do
some touchpoint stuff here and work together, 'cause there's many ways to skin a cat.
I love competition, and I don't even think we're competition.
I think, let's keep hitting this thing.
Think of every battle, every war, every whatever.
It's like you got foot soldiers, you got guys in helicopters, you got the bombers, you got the whole thing.
That's how you attack something.
So I love the fact that people are getting brave right now.
But I think we've built something so cool with Locals.
We've raised a nice chunk of change.
As I've told you guys before, I don't take a dime.
Actually, starting in July, I'll be totally honest with you, I am going to take a tiny bit of money because I do, in effect, a lot of my time is working for locals.
But the entire year and a half we've built this thing, I haven't taken a dime.
I've just put a lot of time in.
Obviously I own a nice percentage of it, so if something amazing happens, that'll be great.
But that really isn't why I did it.
I wanted to build something for me that was gonna protect my stuff,
and that's exactly what we did.
So rubinreport.com is the first project of Locals, and now Scott Adams is on there,
and Bridget Phetasy, and Yaron Brook, and Karlyn Borsenko, and a whole bunch of people.
And it's like, anyone that's on there, if you're watching this, one of my trolls,
one of my troll haters on YouTube, I know you guys watch all my videos
and you wait for me to say something that you can take out of context.
If you are watching this and you absolutely hate me, but you're a content creator of any kind,
you can sign up at locals.com.
You can use our set of tools to build a digital home, and then you can hate on Dave Rubin all day long
in your Locals, because I'm not building something.
Now for me, we built it using, to solve my needs first, and now I think we can give it to everybody else to truly be free from big tech.
So it's not a replacement of Twitter or YouTube or any of those things.
But if, look, nothing's stopping YouTube from kicking me off tomorrow.
Just a fact, right?
Like, it's just reality.
I don't like that reality.
It just is.
All of our videos are on Locals.
We have a sick, awesome, really clean video player that I absolutely love.
Um, there's no ads on there.
There's ad-free podcasts and all that stuff.
You can buy tickets to things.
And there's just a great community.
And there's no trolls because you gotta pay a couple bucks to get in.
Anyone on Locals can set whatever prices they want.
Ours, the minimum is five bucks, but we've got people that do 100 bucks a month.
Some people do five.
I've given free memberships to people.
If you're a vet, or if you were a veteran, or if you're not a vet doctor, a veteran of a war, or if you lost your job or something like that, I'm more than happy to give people some free access.
And we built something really cool, so check it out.
And I love the fact that Parler's picking up steam.
We're in good shape.
All right, let's see what's going on here.
Man, I've been talking for a while.
Here we go.
unidentified
Let's see.
So, I'm going to go ahead and do a little bit of a test.
I'm going to go ahead and do a little bit of a test.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
So does David Yannick completely spoil you today with excellent food?
What's the menu plan or will he surprise you?
So I don't know what the menu plan is yet.
I haven't eaten anything except for the coffee that I'm drinking right in front of me, which has.
I put a scoop of collagen protein powder and I do some mushroom supplements, some lion's mane and some other stuff in there.
So I haven't eaten anything today.
I assume there'll be something fun planned for lunch, and then dinner, as I said, we're going out with friends.
I can't publicly announce where we're going, but it's one of my favorite restaurants in L.A., and I haven't been out to eat in, you know, whatever it is, four months or something.
So I am psyched about that.
But David is an incredible chef.
You can check out his Instagram.
David's Cookbook is the name of it.
And you can also go to davidscookbook.com and see a lot of the stuff that he's cooking.
And he's working on a cookbook also, an actual cookbook.
And yeah, you know, one of the nice things about lockdown is that I hope you learned.
Some skills or refined something that you do or found some new hobbies or something like that.
So one of the things that I've done is the entire side of our house is lined with planters.
We built them and then I bought a couple, but lined with planters that are like this.
And we've got about, I don't know, 30 feet of planters.
And we're growing tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers and zucchini.
I grew a zucchini that was like this, but huge cucumbers.
And what else are we growing back there?
All sorts of, like a huge amount of different peppers and jalapenos and all kinds of stuff.
And I love doing it.
I love tending to the, it's not a garden per se, it's just, you know, it's my, it's an LA garden, I guess you could say.
But I love tending to it and I love eating the things that we make.
And I think a lot of people got more into gardening or did more house projects in the midst of this stuff.
One of the things that I was saying at the beginning of lockdown is it's like, There's opportunity here, you know, it's like you're stuck in your house.
It's like, well, make your house nicer, figure out some new skills, learn a new hobby, whatever it might be.
And I think a lot of people actually did do that.
So that is nice.
All right, let's see what else is going on over here.
Were you a gamer?
What kind of games did you and do you like to play?
So I was a gamer back in the day, which is why I referenced working at Electronics Boutique.
I mean, my youth was growing up on, I remember seeing 8-bit Nintendo at my buddy John's house for the first time, I think in 85.
So I was about nine years old, and I remember seeing Mario Brothers, and I was blown away.
So Nintendo, you know, the original Nintendo, which I have my childhood original Nintendo in the other room.
It wasn't working.
I was blowing in the games.
I actually watched a YouTube video.
I took it apart.
I cleaned every little piece of it.
And it's humming like a bird these days.
So I've got my original Nintendo in there.
I've got Sega Genesis in there.
Colin Moriarty gave me a PS4.
You may remember that from a while back.
And then a fan sent me a Nintendo Switch.
But honestly, I don't have time to play anything.
I just don't.
But during lockdown, We did get some headsets and me and David
and my brother and my nephew, who is, he's about 10, we play Gauntlet Slayer Edition on PS4.
So it's just like, it's just a hack slash, you know, you got the wizard and the Valkyrie
and the little guy and the other thing.
And you just run around just crushing things.
And that's sort of the limit of what my, I can't do these big role playing games.
I can't invest.
I don't like running 3D.
I like sort of looking down on things and then running through things.
It's just how my brain works at this point.
So I wish I had more time.
I really do.
If I'm at a mall or something and I walk by a video game store, I always walk in.
I like seeing what's going on.
I just know I don't have the time in life, but I was a huge, huge gamer.
Sega Genesis was probably my favorite system.
That's where I got into all the sports games, NBA Live and Madden Football and all that stuff.
I think Ghouls and Ghosts is one of the greatest video games of all time.
All right, let's see.
What else do we have here?
I'm plowing through, I'm just trying to find some not political ones.
Oh wait, I'm scrolling the wrong way here.
Here we go.
Happy birthday!
Just curious to know if you ever used to have a particular CD or cassette tape.
Remember when those were a thing in your collection that you secretly loved but didn't want anyone to know you had?
I love this question!
This is gonna be the craziest answer you've ever heard.
Um, I had a CD that I did not know, that I did not want people to know I had.
Back in the day, if you bought a Happy Meal at McDonald's for like another dollar or something, they had like eight CDs you could buy.
And I remember going to McDonald's near my house on Jericho Turnpike and buying a Happy Meal.
I got a fish filet sandwich with cheese.
That's it.
No tartar, no lettuce.
Fish filet sandwich with cheese.
It's pretty dry.
I don't know why I liked it, but I did.
And I got, I paid an extra dollar, and I got a Tina Turner Greatest Hits album.
And I don't know why I didn't want people, I don't know if I thought it was girly or whatever, I didn't want people to know I had it, but I would listen to Tina Turner's greatest hits, you know, You're Simply The Best, What's Love Got To Do With It, Nutbush City Limits.
Just absolutely loved it.
I still love Tina Turner.
Going back to a question earlier, she just turned 80.
Man, I would love to interview her.
I think she lives in Switzerland now.
I think she might have even renounced her US citizenship.
I would get on a plane tomorrow if I could sit down with her.
You know, her story Anna Mae Bullock is her real name.
Her story is absolutely incredible, and there was the movie, What's Love Got to Do With It, with Angela Bassett and, what's his name, from The Matrix, Lawrence Fishburne, and, you know, that she married Ike Turner, and it was hugely abusive, like, horrifically abusive, and drug use and all that stuff, but she kept going, she kept going, she knew what she wanted, and she eventually becomes the solo star Tina Turner that we all know.
So, Tina's my favorite solo female musician by far.
I would say Frankie Valli on the male side.
I'm old school, what can I tell you guys?
But I don't know why I didn't want people to know it, but I do remember old CD, I remember old CDs, not old CDs, old cassette tapes, where you could listen to something on the radio and then I had like a Sony boombox and you could record what was on the radio and create your own mixes.
It was a long time ago, man, a long time.
Let's see.
All right.
It is, it is night.
Wow.
I've been going for a while.
I've been going hour 15.
All right.
We'll do a couple more.
And then I don't know what these people have in store for me for my birthday.
It could involve anything here in LA.
unidentified
I might be able to take a walk.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
That's pretty much all you can do.
It would be a walk.
I'm going to take a birthday walk.
unidentified
All right.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Let's see.
Dave, we'll go back to a political one for a sec.
Do you think the opposition to this cultural revolution we are now in can effectively counter the left without its own activists and protesters on the streets?
I think people like Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson, you, et cetera, are fighting the good intellectual fight, but is that enough to stem the tide?
There's a couple interesting things about that question.
I mean, I don't think it can be won purely on the idea side, meaning, This is one of the flaws I see with a lot of people and I'm sure I fall into this and I would say a lot of the IDW crew whatever is left of that falls into.
You can't just sit there and criticize the ideas and think that that's going to win in and of itself and I think the reason we know that to be true is that if criticizing the ideas was the totality of how you fight this thing, then, well, there were plenty of us doing this for years, and some of these ideas would have been stopped, right?
Like, all of us saying this stuff about college campuses, and calling it out, and all the viral videos that we all made about it, it would have done something to stop it, but it actually didn't.
Now, that isn't to say that what we did did nothing, because I think it woke up millions of people in the process.
I meet you guys all the time, and you tell me that, so that's great too, and that's sort of the silent majority theory.
But I think one of the things that I see now is a lot of people are just saying the same things over and over.
Like, oh, we were saying those things three years ago.
And yes, I do find it personally validating that the things that I was saying five years ago now everyone is saying.
So I find that it's like, oh, that's nice and that's validating.
But obviously just saying things, just me talking about these things or other people talking about these things, That is not enough.
Now, these guys are using violence, they're tearing down statues, they're burning down cities.
Every Democrat is afraid to say a word because they know they'll come for them, right?
Nancy Pelosi, do I think Nancy Pelosi really wants to take down pictures of old Democrats in the Senate?
Or does she really want to take down statues?
No, but she knows she can't stop it because they'll gladly destroy her.
She's an old, rich, millionaire white woman.
They'll take her out, they'll take Schumer out, they'll gladly take Biden out, and they'll take everybody else out.
They have nothing left to stop it.
What I do think can stop it, I mean, in many ways this is what my book's about.
The conservatives have some tools to stop it that the liberals don't have.
I've talked about this, but it's a sad thing for me to admit, in a way, and I address it in the book, that liberalism, in its truest sense, does have a weakness.
The idea of liberalism as open-mindedness and open inquiry and tolerance and diversity,
well, it can be so full of tolerance that it becomes tolerant of intolerance.
And that's what the progressives and the Marxists snuck into the political system to basically
destroy the left in America and to destroy and eat out and hollow out the Democratic
Party.
It doesn't, you know, it's like the Democrats weren't always like this.
They weren't, you know, when I talk to my parents about this who were old school Democrats,
like JFK Democrats, it wasn't like this.
There was a reason, a sensible reason to be a Democrat.
The left and the progressives have completely annihilated that from the inside.
They basically, I think, they realize, oh, Bernie didn't get where we want him to get.
Let's just burn down the whole freaking system.
So I guarantee you Bernie is very happy right now.
But Bernie, if you're watching, you shouldn't be that happy, because you're an old millionaire with three houses too, and they're coming for you, buddy, because at the end of the day, you'll have supported Biden, and you supported Hillary, and you're a sellout.
And you don't stand for anything, actually.
Putting that aside, I don't think just talking about these things can stop it.
I think the conservatives, and when I say conservatives now, I mean anyone that believes in individual rights.
If you believe that the Constitution is a good founding document, if you believe in God-given rights and individual rights that mean that everyone that's a legal citizen should have the same exact rights regardless of their skin color and all that stuff, which is what we're supposed to believe and what most of us do believe, But the radicals have tricked us into thinking he's somehow bigoted, even though they're the ones that are the new bigots.
So that's what I mean by conservative.
If you are that, you gotta start building institutions right now.
That's, by the way, why when I said before about Parler, it doesn't matter whether Parler absolutely is gonna work or not as the Twitter replacement or the Twitter killer, but the idea that they're building something is right.
The idea that I took competition and decided to start a tech company is right.
I think Locals is gonna explode and save a lot of A lot of good people from being banned off these things.
But ultimately, competition, freedom, all of these things, the right needs to start building institutions.
It needs to start building academic institutions and media institutions and journalistic institutions, and I think some of them exist, and do not let social justice in there.
Social justice is going to destroy every liberal institution, every liberal college, every mainstream media outlet, the New York Times, CNN, Harvard, Yale, They're all going down.
There is nothing that can be done.
The core is melting down.
We can pretend that they have to stay and that they're worth fighting for.
And that isn't to say that everyone that's part of them is all bad, but the thing is going down.
And all of the academics and all of the pundits that keep talking about it in an intellectual way, you're all going down with it.
It just is.
It doesn't mean it's a great thing.
It just is.
That are on the right, what I would say are new conservatives.
And by the way, my new book, or my second book, which we just took care of the deal, is gonna be about this.
Conservatives have a chance to build new institutions that will be stronger and wiser.
And conservatives are not good at the cultural stuff, and they're gonna have to get on board some of that stuff.
They're gonna have to get on board some of the new horizons in terms of space and science, and that families May not look exactly like they wanted families to look at, but they got the big stuff right about family.
There's all sorts of interesting things happening on the right.
So yes, you cannot fight it just on the idea battle alone.
This thing cannot be won by great Tucker Carlson monologues.
That's not a shot at Tucker.
I love Tucker.
I think he's doing great work.
But it can't just be won with ideas.
These people are gonna come to burn down things, then you gotta build things.
And you gotta build them fast and with the right Uh, with the right people behind it, and I think that can actually be done.
Alright people, I'm gonna do two more, and then I'm gonna go take a birthday walk!
Very exciting.
Let's see, um...
This is a good one.
And then, Michael, see if you can, or Phoenix, see if you can grab one more as the final one that should be the perfect final one for me as I answer this one.
This is Eric, he says, what has been the most humbling moment, thought, or realization you've had during the launch and rise of Locals, RubinReport.com, Don't Burn This Book, and all your other successes this year?
I mean, the whole thing.
Like, literally the whole thing.
I'll try to give you a better answer for that, but like, on the broad level, Every single day, I get a text from somebody who says, you know, I'm with a friend right now and he just mentioned you and didn't even know we were friends.
Or, I'm with, you know, I just, I'm at work and I saw that somebody has your book there.
Or, you know, I was at my friend's house and I saw his computer was open and your show was on there.
Like, I get some version of that text every day from somebody.
So, that is pretty freaking awesome.
It's really, really cool.
You know, there's a guy, I won't mention his name, but he lives on my street, and he's a well-known record executive.
He's retired now, but had his hand in major, major records of the last 30 years.
One day I was walking Clyde and he said, hey, Dave Rubin and Clyde, I saw you on Dana Perino and we started talking.
It turns out that we grew up two blocks, he's a little older than me, but we grew up two blocks away from each other in the same hometown.
We went to the same high school, somehow ended up living here together and he's become a big fan and a good guy and introduced me to some of the other neighbors.
And when you start realizing that there's other sane people in your neighborhood, this is why what is happening
right now through the Marxists or whatever you want to call these guys, I'm tired of talking about it
as the left, but this new thing, what it preys on is that we will stop talking to each other,
that you won't know what your neighbors think, that you will be afraid to share whatever your thoughts are.
And when you put something out in the world and then people respond positively to it,
you don't know how that can affect things.
So that I've been able to be a little bit of a part of that, and then get the successes along with that.
You know, like some of the financial successes, you know, it's nice when people say nice things about me, or I get emails, people will say, you know, Dave, I, you know, one of the type of things that I get all the time is people will say, Dave, you know, I've been watching your show for three months, and I didn't realize you were gay, and then you offhand made a comment about it.
It's like, you know, I'm a conservative, I'm a Christian, I just want you to know I don't care.
You seem like a good guy.
I love hearing things like that.
Even though HuffPo or Vox will have you believe I'm radicalizing people to the alt-right.
You guys are good.
You're good.
I would say it's sort of like the whole package.
I guess the lesson in that is Get over the bravery deficit.
You know, my last PragerU video was entitled The Bravery Deficit.
Get over it.
If you think you can weather this storm, this thing that is happening in our country right now, and it's happening all over Western nations, it's happening in the UK right now, all over the place, if you think you can just be quiet and not say what you think, Just so that you'll be spared, or that we'll get through this, or someone else will fix it, well then you're gonna get what you deserve at the end.
In the video, The Bravery Deficit, you should check it out on YouTube if you haven't seen it, I describe it, you're a frog in a slowly boiling pot, and it does not end well for the frog.
So get on board, fight, I don't think there's anything particularly brave or special or whatever about me, I'm some guy who started talking and it started working.
That is it, and that you guys have been on the adventure with me is amazing.
All right, I like this one.
Who has been your biggest influence in comedic, political, and intellectual forums?
I like this one because it's my birthday, and at 44, I think I've managed to do something decent here, and you don't just do that on your own.
You do it because people help you get there.
So in the comedic one, I mentioned Cosby earlier, but that's not really the full answer
because that was the one that sort of got me interested in the whole thing.
I would say George Carlin is the greatest standup comic ever.
I mean, the way with words, the linguistic brilliance, the societal stuff.
A lot of people don't know, the night that Lenny Bruce got arrested, George Carlin was arrested with him.
He fought against censorship.
The breadth of his work.
He did something like 20 HBO specials.
And his last HBO special, which was...
I think about 10 years ago, I think he died on, if I'm not mistaken, he died on June 22nd, 2010.
Something like that?
Maybe it was a little after that, but June 22nd, I'm pretty sure was the day he died.
His last HBO special, which was just a couple months before he died, is absolutely brilliant.
He had a couple specials before that that were a little off track, in my opinion, but the breadth of doing that many of those specials where you're saying something that is true, that is real, Man, he was just the best.
In the comedy world, there's always this debate about Pryor versus Carlin.
Those seem to be the big two.
And I would say, you know, Pryor did more stuff about himself.
It was about his own pain, his own existence, all of that.
Carlin did more societal stuff.
That's more interesting to me, personally.
Pryor was great, but Pryor also, I think, only had two major specials, where Carlin had a gajillion of them.
So that's the comedic.
The political, On the political side, who has influenced me the most?
On the political side, who has influenced me the most?
I mean, I never met him, but I would say John Stuart Mill on "Liberty."
I mention this all the time.
I've got a copy of it in my nightstand.
You can read it.
It's like this thick.
You can get through it.
It is worth reading about understanding where rights come from and what the role of government should be and what your duty as a citizen is and all of those things.
I would have loved to have interviewed him.
Apparently it's not gonna happen.
Maybe we could do some Jurassic Park-style cloning one of these days.
In a modern sense, I don't know that there's anyone...
There are politicians that I like, like I like Rand Paul, but I don't know that there's anyone that has influenced me in a huge way.
It's more about the thinkers before who set this, you know, it's all about those patriarchal, those white supremacist thinkers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
I mean, Thomas Jefferson, really, go to his house in Virginia, Monticello, go there before they burn that thing down.
And by the way, you take the tour there, 80% of the tour is talking about slavery.
So they imply, oh, they're like trying to hide history.
The guy was writing the laws that freed the slaves and was a better person than any of you idiots that are taking his monuments down.
And then on the intellectual forum, I mean, it's Jordan for sure, right?
Like I spent a year and a half on the road with Jordan Peterson in 20 countries and over 100 shows, and I got to be around the most important public intellectual of our time, Who I promise you will be back hopefully sometime this year.
I don't want to hint too much, but I have a sense you may hear something from him kind of soon.
But to see that this guy fought for what he believed in, stood up to every mob that went after him, Made people's lives better.
The people at the shows, people crying.
They were off drugs.
They got out of abusive relationships.
They stopped being abusive.
They fixed whatever family problems they had.
I saw this guy fix the world, genuinely fix the world.
And I saw him on the intellectual side, he never gave the same talk twice, an hour and a half lecture.
One night he would be doing this thing and then I could see he would get to a point where, and sometimes he would say it, he would say, you know, he would do something like this, he would go, You know, I need to think about that a little bit more, and I'm gonna continue on that.
And then, literally, the next night, I would see him start going there, and then he would push it a little bit further.
I don't know what kind of public intellectual, what kind of performer does that sort of thing, like, takes those kind of risks, but he did it every night.
And, you know, if you haven't read my book yet, Chapter Nine, it's all about what it was like to be on the road with Jordan, and he sort of became a mentor by osmosis, and yeah, that.
That is all I've got to say about that.
All right, people.
I've been talking for one hour and 32 minutes.
I believe we were trying to get this to an hour 30.
That's pretty good.
Thank you guys for all the kind words.
I'm seeing all... Oh, and Joe Jorgensen just emailed confirming our interview.
All right, Joe.
Even the Libertarians, as disorganized as they might be, apparently they know how to get on YouTube.
Happy to see it.
Thank you guys for all the birthday wishes, all the support.
It's been a great year.
This is just the beginning.
I'm probably gonna be pretty quiet on social media today.
I'll jump in over at reubenreport.com, probably do a live chat, post some personal stuff, but I think I'm gonna ease up on Twitter for my birthday.
And now I'm going to take a birthday walk, which is one of the only two legal things you can do here in California.
You're allowed to take a walk, and you are allowed to go to the bathroom between 3 and 4 p.m.
Pacific.
Thank you guys.
Have a great day, everybody.
I need some water.
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