Jesse Watters joins Dave Rubin to discuss his book, Get It Together, detailing interviews with radical leftists who he argues suffer from borderline personality disorders rooted in abusive childhoods. Watters contends that projecting personal pain onto society has destroyed traditional family structures and social boundaries, creating a monolithic mob that silences dissent unlike the competitive right. He critiques President Biden's diminished stature and the fractured left over Gaza, contrasting podcast freedom with cable news formulas while reflecting on Bill O'Reilly's advice to avoid boredom. Ultimately, the conversation suggests restoring stigma around drugs and alcohol is essential for societal function amidst extreme cultural pendulum swings. [Automatically generated summary]
And it turns out when they've poured their life stories out and confessed their deepest, darkest sins, their ideologies have nothing to do with reason or logic.
These are people with borderline personality disorders.
They've had tough lives.
They've had crazy lives.
But we've all had crazy lives.
And they say to themselves, I don't have problems.
Society is the problem.
So society needs to accommodate my problems.
And what that does is, Ruben, that makes all of their problems our problems.
Yeah, well, we did spend five minutes trying to get your camera and audio right, which kind of gets me to my first question for you, because I'm fairly certain that we actually might be long lost brothers, because I hear you often on Fox talking about your liberal mother.
And her calling you after you do shows or texting you during shows.
And I'm pretty sure that your mother is my mother.
So you want to talk about our moms for a little bit?
Well, that actually gets to the heart of the book, because when I was checking it out this morning, and obviously I interview all the people, right, and how crazy the woke are and everything else, but it's mostly about the intellectual stuff that leads the woke people to go crazy.
What I like about this is you were kind of going into what I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is there's a reason psychologically and sort of family-wise
that these people go kind of bananas and end up with all the wrong stuff.
So I guess first, how did you come to that conclusion to decide to then write the book this way?
Because it is a different take on just blowing apart the woke.
And then after the money part, I used to go out on the O'Reilly Factor and interview a lot of crazy people on the streets, but I was only able to talk to them for a couple of minutes.
So I thought, why not?
I sit down and talk to these people for three hours.
Four hours.
So I talked to about two dozen of the craziest people you could find.
People that want to topple statues, open the borders, legalize drugs, empty the prisons.
And it turns out when they've poured their life stories out and confessed their deepest, darkest sins, their ideologies have nothing to do with reason or logic.
These are people with borderline personality disorders.
They've had tough lives.
They've had crazy lives.
But we've all had crazy lives.
And they say to themselves, I don't have problems.
Society is the problem.
So society needs to accommodate my problems.
And what that does is, Ruben, that makes all of their problems our problems.
And we just need to tell these people to get it together and stop accommodating all of these things.
We don't say that enough.
We don't say the word no.
And it turns out, as you alluded to, a lot of these people, the people with emotional support squirrels, The eco-sexuals, the people that smoke toads who I interviewed.
Many of these people had insanely dysfunctional families.
Did you find that after talking to a bunch of them that many of them are just kind of the pawns in the bigger game?
Meaning like there are bad people, I would say bad people at the top that are pushing these bad ideas and through colleges and bad lefty politicians and all that.
But the average kid that's out there where I used to make fun of them a year ago, I'm starting When we play the videos, I'm actually having a lot of sympathy for them, in a way, because of what you just described.
Like, it's not that fun for me to make fun of the purple-haired person anymore, because it's like, man, the world, your family and the world, really failed you.
And you used to just take pleasure in mocking people.
And obviously it's fun to make fun of people and joke around.
And there's a lot of silly stuff in the book.
We talk to voodoo priestesses.
We talk to people who, you know, Obviously have the purple hair, the nose rings and things like that, but you do feel sympathy for them.
But you also realize that society has tried to destroy the family.
And when you destroy the family, these families are then producing dysfunctional people that politically usually vote Democrat.
And you start to realize if you destroy the family and you commit drugs and alcohol, and you call everybody a victim, that creates a mentality where you're allowing these types of borderline personality disorders to fester.
And we don't stigmatize things anymore.
Remember when you and I were growing up, if you got caught with drugs, that was a big deal.
Now you're not allowed to say, now you're not even allowed to say, you know what?
The first son's a crackhead.
You can't even say that.
That's considered judgmental.
And I think we need to bring stigma back, judgment back, because society has to have some values and some boundaries in order for society to function properly.
So since this might be your first podcast, what do you make as a network guy?
What do you make between the divide of what's going on online, conversations that are having online, versus conversations that are having on the networks?
I would say Gutfeld and you probably are the two most kind of crossover people on Fox in that you're kind of in both worlds, even though you don't do podcasts.
But I mean, I'm picking up what you guys are putting down all the time.
You guys are on the cutting edge, whether it's the podcasts X or wherever we see you guys.
I mean, you guys are right there and and pushing the envelope and and attacking things on a grassroots level.
That is just it's so appealing and and it's we need it because a lot of the stuff you see on Fox or you see on the networks, you know, it starts there.
It either starts in print.
Or it starts on social media or some of these new platforms.
But as a podcast virgin, I do appreciate the opportunity to be able to relax and speak freely for 30 minutes or whatever this is because you see cable news.
I'm talking about, I have an hour, and then I have commercial breaks, and I have sound bites, and then I have a guest, and then I tease out, and then I pay the bills.
So it's a very strict formula that you, if you're not in that world, you don't really understand, but the freedom of the podcast, it's definitely easier to get your point across.
I have to be really concise on a cable news platform.
Whatever we want to do on the show on eight o'clock, I do whatever I want.
I mean, we give the rundowns to executives.
They look at it.
No one ever says anything.
It's never a problem.
I'm never told what to do, what not to do, what not to say.
I've conversations with people, but you know, we're all on the same team.
And in terms of in my ear, I mean, anybody that does television, you have a director in your ear telling you six, five, four, because sometimes you're up against a hard break, you have a commercial.
Or sometimes the guest is like, you know, sometimes the guest just doesn't understand we have to go to a commercial.
You ever see that clip when they come back from commercial like five seconds in on Hannity and he's smoking his vape and he starts like freaking out?
I love when newscasters somehow get caught cursing or fumbling with something because there's such a break in the way you know them in a way, you know?
I mean, I would love to see a Dave Rubin blooper reel, but I don't know if you have the humility or the self-awareness to put that out there for the world to see.
I got a job working in the basement of Fox, labeling tapes.
I sat next to a girl named Candy, who dotted her I with a heart.
And then I just found out that there was an opening on The O'Reilly Factor, so I went in for an interview and I gave Bill my resume and he looks at me and he says, what's your father do?
And I told him about my dad dead.
And then he looked down and I think he forgot I was there.
And then, so it was awkward for about 30 seconds of silence.
And then I said, Bill, I just read your latest book.
It was amazing.
And all of a sudden he perks up and he goes, you seem like a smart kid.
A lot of what I've learned from Bill is execution, in terms of production.
He really taught me how to produce the broadcast, in terms of using sound elements, teases, cold opens, those types of things, how to control the guests, how to control the flow of the conversation.
What do you make of what's going on kind of politically on the right right now?
Like, we could talk about the left all day long and how bananas they've gone and everything else, but there does seem to be like a shift in what's going on on the right, sort of more traditional conservatives.
Now there's sort of like a Tucker, like, I don't know, you could say maybe hyper libertarian thing.
There's just some fighting that I don't think a lot of people saw coming.
And we got a big election, I don't know if you know about this, coming in November.
I don't know if that's the most important thing, but Geraldo was a performer, and he was a television pro.
I don't know how much Geraldo believes about what he was saying half the time.
He's a great entertainer, and around the table on the five, he had a lot of gusto, a lot of gumption.
He always told me it doesn't matter who the biggest physically person is at the table, as long as you Feel yourself as the biggest person at the table.
That's really what counts.
I mean, Jessica Tarloff is pretty sporty.
Harold Ford Jr.
makes a lot of sense, but it's always good to have a counterpoint.
People, especially the audience, likes to see a little friction.
Is that the funny thing that Fox actually does put on counterpoint people almost every night on primetime?
They at least try to get somebody and Fox gets so much crap for being partisan while CNN and MSNBC basically, you know, occasionally they'll give you the pet Republican and they give them a cookie and then they move them down the line, but they won't put me on.
I mean, I could talk to these people, but they just won't do it.
Yeah, because you know, you'd make them look bad, Rubin.
They need to look good.
And you don't ever want to put on a guest that makes you look bad.
So when you see a lot of these guests booked on MSNBC or CNN or even the network television shows, they're designed to make liberalism or the hosts look good.
You don't ever put on a powerful, persuasive, charismatic conservative that knows more than they do, and we know more than they do, in terms of the facts or the statistics or just what's going on.
They book either a never Trumper or they book like some sad, pathetic conservative that doesn't really have game outside of that little role they're playing to be a court jester.
But they're going to pop him with whatever they have to give him until the debates, and then he'll get through that, if he even debates, and then drag him across the finish line, and then he'll pass the torch to Kamala.
We did a series on Crime Time called the Get It Together series, where we'd invite some of these characters that participated in the book project on the show to talk to us.
And we had on this woman who was one of the legalized prostitution.
She was a prostitute herself for a while, and she came from a very wealthy background and started stripping at the club at 16, hooked on meth, pimped out, and sex worker in Vegas.
And the chapter is brutally honest.
And she came on my show and she actually started crying.
And she said, you know, what I told you was really disrespectful to my father.
This is not the way to deal with men.
She had told me she just sees men as a way to extract wealth.
She looks at you, she looks at me, and she just says, how can I take this man's money?
And upon further reflection, she said, that wasn't right.
And so there is an epiphany, which I take full credit for.
And hopefully, you know, people listen.
Everyone's a narcissist, Ruben.
They love to talk.
They love to be listened to.
And you think maybe after three hours of telling someone how you feel, that's helpful.
focused perfectionist quality to someone like that and O'Reilly, let's just say, had that about him.
We went to a Yankee game.
We taped the O'Reilly factor at three o'clock.
He took the staff to the Yankee game.
We were in the suite and then there was a rain delay and he just puts on his show and he just stands there in the middle of the suite and just by himself, he just watches his show like this during the rain delay.