April 11, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| 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 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. | ||
| You talk to MSNBC hosts? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| We're going to get to them next. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is the host of Jesse Waters' Primetime, | ||
| one of the co-hosts of The Five and author of the new book, Get It Together, | ||
| Troubling Tales from the Liberal Fringe. | ||
| Jesse Waters, welcome to your first podcast. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| This might be my first podcast, but I'm really jealous because you look better than I look and you have a nicer background. | ||
| Listen, I don't know about the look part. | ||
| We do have a fancy background. | ||
| But you have a very fancy studio. | ||
| You're in fancy studios with a lot of equipment and big crews and all that all day long. | ||
| So there's something to be said for that. | ||
| I'm in my house right now, so I don't have any assistants fussing over me. | ||
| So I'm solo. | ||
| So wish me luck, Reuben. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Brothers from another mother? | ||
| I mean, you go first, Ruben. | ||
| Does your mom hate watch your shows? | ||
| Does your mom think that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy? | ||
| Did your mom march in the Women's March? | ||
| Did your mom Vote for Mondale and Dukakis and Gore and Kerry. | ||
| I mean, go for it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| My mom did not march in the stuff and I don't know her full voting record, but she's definitely on the TDS side of things. | ||
| And she does. | ||
| She does fact check me on some of this. | ||
| And I do sometimes get text messages during my show or first thing in the morning. | ||
| And yet here we are, pretty decent fellas with okay careers, you know? | ||
| We turned out okay. | ||
| And I always say, she could be politically liberal, but she did raise me well. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, I wrote the book for money, Ruben. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's why everybody writes the book. | |
| Finally, someone told the truth. | ||
| And I tell the truth. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You talked to MSNBC hosts? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| We're going to get to them next. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Alcoholic fathers, abusive fathers, neglectful barstool dads. | ||
| And that seemed to be the main thing. | ||
| It's either drug and alcohol abuse, sexual abuse, or absentee fathers. | ||
| And you can almost tell if someone doesn't have a dad in their life. | ||
|
unidentified
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They act out that pain. | |
| In the rest of the world, and they're projecting whether it's daddy issues or revenge or attention seeking. | ||
| And that's what I found out about by interviewing about 2 dozen of these people. | ||
| I actually don't mean this as a joke, but how difficult was it to sit down with these people for three hours? | ||
| I mean, we play the same clips you're playing on your show. | ||
| You watch 10 seconds of them screaming or crying or talking to themselves or wearing dog masks or whatever, and it's like, three hours? | ||
| Three hours? | ||
| I suffer fools. | ||
| It's just a gift. | ||
| I'm a patient man. | ||
| What can I say? | ||
| I was talking to Bongino the other day. | ||
| I said, Bongino, you'd never be able to do this project. | ||
| I mean, you'd be jumping down their throat. | ||
| At this age, at 45, I know I look 35, but Ruben, at 45, I learned how to listen. | ||
| And if we can just listen to people, we can find out the why. | ||
| And that's what I tried to do in this book. | ||
| Why do people believe the way they do? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, you are a mature and compassionate individual. | ||
| I got two years on you, that's why. | ||
| You didn't used to be like that. | ||
| You used to be a shallow, ignorant fool. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Like, if you got arrested, that was a big deal. | |
| Now it's like people are proud of it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do you kind of admire how the left has been able to destroy so much? | ||
| Not what they've done, but they did it. | ||
| You know, we can all say, all right, we're all good, decent people and family and belief and politics. | ||
| We get it. | ||
| But like, look what they did on our watch, right? | ||
| Yes, and people don't respect the culture war. | ||
| People roll their eyes when you say church, God, family, clean yourself up, don't smoke toad or don't rip tubes for like 45 years. | ||
| But it's it's cliche, but it's true. | ||
| And that's why it's true. | ||
| It's because it's there's a there's a way to live your life. | ||
| That's I'm not saying you have to be a teetotaler or whatever, but there's a way to live your life in a graceful, classy way that that. | ||
| Helps your family, helps society, and helps the community. | ||
| They've taken a sledgehammer to that, and politically that might help them in certain cities, in certain areas, but you've seen it. | ||
| This pendulum is swinging back from the Me Too extreme to the Defund the Police extreme. | ||
| I hope to the spending and to the open borders, you see it coming back now. | ||
| So all we can say, yeah, they had a good run, but all of these Frivolous ideologies, they run their course after a while when you see the destruction. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Very honored that you're here. | ||
| But you know what I mean? | ||
| In terms of getting what's happening online. | ||
| I mean, I follow you guys. | ||
| I'm all over social media. | ||
| I look at X, they're calling it now. | ||
|
unidentified
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I still can't say X. Yeah, I don't say X. I can't change. | |
| But I'm all focused on what you guys are doing. | ||
| I know everybody. | ||
| I don't engage on that. | ||
| I have a person that does that for me. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So let me ask you what people always want to know about cable news hosts when they do podcasts. | ||
| Do they tell you what to say, Jesse Waters? | ||
| Do they sit you down and say, you can't say this, you can't say that, and all the rest of it? | ||
| I've done your show a bunch of times. | ||
| We've never talked beforehand. | ||
| You interview me live. | ||
| I think we always do it live, not even live to tape, just live, live. | ||
| And it is what it is, for the record. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Was I told what to say? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| When you're doing your show or you're writing the rundown or all that stuff, are network guys in your ear telling you what you can and can't say? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| We have free... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I got to wrap the guest, but they're not telling me what to say. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah, those are always funny. | ||
| I mean, bloopers are the best. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Because I'm sure your blooper reel is quite... | |
| It's a lot of fuck it, we'll do it live. | ||
| The ultimate blooper. | ||
| Well actually, speaking of that, so you started, were you a researcher originally on O'Reilly Factor? | ||
| I was a production assistant, which means I did anything they told me to do. | ||
| I got part B, researched, cut tape, you know, I was the bottom of the totem pole. | ||
| And did you want to be a host on Primetime Fox? | ||
| Was that the goal, or you were just trying to figure it out? | ||
| I needed a job, Ruben. | ||
| I was 23 years old. | ||
| I had no health insurance. | ||
| I was making minimum wage. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You start Monday. | ||
| Do you realize how much you learned from him, or do you feel that you learned a lot? | ||
| I mean, even sometimes with your mannerisms and hand motions, you have some of Bill, obviously, in what you do now. | ||
| I mean, I've learned so much from Bill. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I remember when I got the seven o'clock slot, he gave me a piece of advice. | ||
| He said, Jesse, one thing, don't be boring. | ||
| So that was the best advice he ever gave me. | ||
| Don't be boring. | ||
| 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 usually try to spend too much time classifying and analyzing the right. | ||
| I see the right as my family, and I see, you know, independency, the whole country is my family. | ||
| I like to dissect the left, and if you look at the right and if you look at the left, the left looks more divided than ever. | ||
| What you're seeing going on in NBC News, A lot of the talk about Biden getting rid of him at the convention. | ||
| I mean, I see a lot of the stuff with Gaza. | ||
| A lot of the blacks and Hispanics are really teed off at the Biden administration. | ||
| Young Americans moving to Trump, if you just saw the latest poll, really moving to Trump. | ||
| I never thought I'd see that ever. | ||
| And so it looks really, really fractured on that side. | ||
| In terms of the media, I believe you're talking about I mean, there's more voices on the right, and I like that. | ||
| I love that there's you, there's Rogan. | ||
| I follow these... what's the guy's name? | ||
| Sernovich? | ||
| I listen to that guy, Jack Posobiec. | ||
| I'm probably butchering his name. | ||
| Charlie. | ||
| There's so many people to listen to. | ||
| And it's not just on social media. | ||
| All these books that have come out. | ||
| I'm just reading a lot of history. | ||
| I'm reading a lot of American history. | ||
| Presidential history. | ||
| The more the merrier. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is a lot of people fighting on the right? | ||
| I don't really care about that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, I think there's like, it does seem like there is some fights brewing, but I'm especially, you know, I'm, I'm a new guy to the right. | ||
| I still consider myself that. | ||
| So I'm always trying to heal that stuff. | ||
| Like guys, we got much bigger fish to fry than whether we exactly agree on foreign policy or not. | ||
| It's healthy, you know, and, and, and, and listen, it's a business. | ||
| People are jockeying for market share and people have strong philosophical beliefs about policy. | ||
| Or about the party, or about the movement, or about the country. | ||
| So if they want to go after each other, sometimes it's personal and that's entertaining. | ||
| But it's a good thing. | ||
| I think it makes us healthy, it makes us better, it makes us more competitive. | ||
| You know, a lot of the times on the left you don't see that. | ||
| They do that behind the scenes. | ||
| And a lot of their stuff is not even really that ideological. | ||
| They're such a mob. | ||
| That, like, even if one person gets out of line, it's like, they just get their throats slit. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I was screaming about it as a lefty for a long time. | ||
| And the second I started talking to, I mean, guys like Gutfeld, not even like hardcore conservatives, I was on the outs. | ||
| Do you wish there were more liberals, I guess, that you could sit down with that could make cogent arguments? | ||
| I mean, even on The Five, Geraldo, I would watch and I'd be like, man, he has just lost it. | ||
| But it was good, I thought, that he was there Somewhat representing something kind of sane? | ||
| Is that a fair estimation? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, for all those great television, he gave me some advice. | ||
|
unidentified
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He said, Jesse, in order to be successful in this business, two things. | |
| Keep your hair and keep your waistline. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So we invite Democrats on Fox all the time. | ||
|
unidentified
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We a lot of the times just get a no. | |
| So. | ||
| Yeah, I know the feeling. | ||
| Speaking of Democrats, what do you make with this guy? | ||
| Pretending to be president right now, because something's not right. | ||
| Do you think that's fair to say? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he's obviously diminished. | ||
| His own justice department says he's diminished. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's no way if he gets reelected, he's going to go the whole four years. | ||
| So if you're, I do, I'm not a Nikki fan, but she said something smart. | ||
| She said, you're not actually running against Biden. | ||
| We're running against Kamala because if he's reelected, he's not making it. | ||
| So if you vote for Biden, you're really voting for Kamala Harris. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| Yeah, it ain't pretty. | ||
| Although she knows that Russia's big and Ukraine's small, so that's pretty good. | ||
| That's something. | ||
| Getting back to the book for the last couple of minutes. | ||
| So you sit down with all these people. | ||
| Okay, they've got problems, family problems, all confused about different things, think they're cats. | ||
| Were you able to get anything across to them? | ||
| Did any bit of listening or anything that you said to them kind of deprogram them out of that thing? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, that they get just so sick of listening to themselves, which happens for guys like us that talk for a living. | ||
| It does happen. | ||
| I get off camera. | ||
| Sometimes I get off camera and I barely speak for the rest of the day because I'm like, I don't want to listen to this anymore, quite frankly. | ||
| Yeah, are you one of those guys that does a show and then watches the show? | ||
| No, never. | ||
| Yeah, I never do that. | ||
| Never. | ||
| You know, you'll love this one. | ||
| I swore that I'm not going to talk about him on my show anymore, but I'm calling a mulligan on this. | ||
| I once had dinner with Don Lemon years ago in New York after he had guests hosted Joy Behar's HLN show. | ||
| So this is way before, you know, like major star Don Lemon. | ||
| And we sat at dinner. | ||
| He put his phone out. | ||
| It's just the two of us, Upper West Side. | ||
| He put his phone out and just watched the show that he had just recorded instead of talking as we were sitting there. | ||
| Swear to God. | ||
| Does that tell you everything you need to know? | ||
| Listen, there's also a hyper... | ||
| 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. | ||
| That sounds like my biggest nightmare. | ||
| But he did it from a professional perspective. | ||
| He was like, what could I improve? | ||
| What didn't I like? | ||
| What could have been better? | ||
| I don't think he was basking in how glorious he was performing. | ||
| Or maybe he was, what do I know? | ||
| Right, the spray tan was just right that day, you know, just right. | ||
| You got anything else you want to say to the internet that maybe doesn't come across every day on Fox now that you're a big podcast star? | ||
| Well, no, it's just an honor to be on a podcast, my first podcast, you've popped my cherry. | ||
| Ruben, I don't think that's probably the best way to phrase this, but... | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| They're going to clip that, you know, and put that across the internet and you're going to get canceled now. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, if they can't cancel me already, I think I'm safe. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| Get it together. | ||
| You've gotten it together. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| The link is down below and Waters, tell mom I said hi. | ||
| Will do. | ||
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