Dave Rubin and Zohran Mamdani clash over NYC's "pied de terre tax" as billionaire Ken Griffin flees to Miami, while Rubin critiques Obama's Colbert interview hypocrisy and analyzes U.S.-Iran negotiations featuring a potential 14-point memorandum with a five-year enrichment ban. The episode also covers Spencer Pratt's LA mayoral run against Karen Bass, Marco Rubio's Vatican meeting with Pope Leo, and Polymarket odds favoring JD Vance for the 2028 GOP nomination, ultimately painting a picture of shifting political tides driven by economic threats and international realignments. [Automatically generated summary]
Don't forget, real quick, in about a month, a month and a couple days, here in the free state of Florida, in the greatest city in the country, Miami, live Rubin Report with yours truly, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Ben Shapiro talks very fast.
Adam Carol, I think he's going to do a little warm up comedy for you.
And Jillian Michaels offering a little Maha insight.
There will be t shirt giveaways.
There will be tequila.
There will be Craziness, maybe we'll release some alligators into the crowd.
You just never know what's going to happen at a show like this.
DaveRubin.com slash events.
And obviously, you know, plenty of you live down here in Florida, but I promise you, if you're out of state, this will be worth it.
It'll be worth getting a hotel for one night and coming, and it's just going to be a great time.
I promise you that.
Today's show is, I'd say, it's a standard kind of dense, thick show.
A lot of stuff.
New York, a little bit out of the LA mayoral debate last night.
Do you remember this guy, Barack Obama?
You know, nice teeth, lies about everything.
He went on Colbert's show, which is about to wrap up.
They're about to cancel that thing.
A little bit on Iran, and then some good stuff around Marco Rubio, which we kind of point, well, we started the show and ended the show with yesterday.
But let's dive in to New York City because, you know, a lot of people seem to think that Zorhan would come in.
And one of the things that I said even is, you know, you could probably make an argument that he could fake it for a while, right?
Like you could fake the budgets for a while and that things would look good for a bit.
I think that was a perfectly legit argument to make.
And then, of course, another argument would make is that you'd bring in this commie jihad type, and basically the whole thing would collapse very quickly.
It seems to be doing the latter more than the former.
The thing that really has sort of stuck at the moment is when, about a week and a half ago, he decided to do this commercial about the pied de terre tax, and he went in front of Ken Griffin from Citadel.
He went in front of Ken Griffin's condo and said, This thing cost $238 million.
It was really a wink, wink when you burn things down or you got to grab a lady wearing a fur coat.
This is maybe where you want to do it.
Don't go to Alex Soros who lives across the street.
Well, Ken Griffin, who controls tremendous amounts of money, employs thousands and thousands of people.
He's not happy about it.
And again, putting aside Ken Griffin for a second, these people that own extra condos in big cities, what they are doing is doing business there.
They go for business purposes and they spend tons of money at restaurants and they go out.
And they employ people and everything else.
So it may sound, for the average ding dong who's listening to his communist drivel, it may sound good.
Oh, it's just their extra place, unless they can afford it, so let's just tax them again.
Like, I suppose, in the dimmest way possible, that sounds legit.
But what you end up doing is punishing the people who are bringing economic resources to your city.
Anyway, Ken Griffin, we played some videos of him yesterday.
He's not happy about this.
He's moving a lot of the operations down to Miami.
And here is Zorhan responding to Ken's.
Expansion of investment in the Free State of Florida.
So I'll first just start by saying that I want all New Yorkers to succeed.
That includes business owners and entrepreneurs who create good paying jobs, who make this city the economic engine not just of our state, but frankly of our country.
And that also includes Ken Griffin, who is a major employer in our city.
That does not negate the fact, however, that our tax system is fundamentally broken.
It rewards extreme wealth while working people are pushed to the brink.
It is a status quo that is unsustainable, that is unjust.
And if we want the city to be one that working people can actually afford to live in, then we need meaningful tax reform that includes the wealthiest New Yorkers paying their fair share.
If there is one generic boilerplate statement that I hate, that is the number one.
Their fair share, right?
This is what Bernie pushed on everybody, and they all repeat it.
So, what would be their fair share?
Well, we have a graph here, and the top 1%.
Do the rich pay their fair share?
The top 1% of people.
And by the way, the billionaire class, they're in the point like 0001%.
The top 1%, can we get the numbers on this?
Sometimes it's a little hard to define, but basically, I think you're in the 1% if you make over 400 grand a year.
Now, everyone, almost everyone watching this, would love to make 400 grand a year.
But if you make 400 grand a year and you're living in New York City and you have two kids in a condo and everything else with all of those taxes, state tax, city tax, blah, blah, blah.
You're actually not some super wealthy robber baron.
That's not what it is.
Put the chart back up.
So, the top 1% pay 46% of the total income tax.
And the bottom percent pay virtually nothing.
So, when he says fair share, OK, so 1% is paying 46%.
That's not fair.
Well, you're right.
It's not fair, but not the way you mean it.
But OK, so what would be fair?
Should they pay 80%, 90%?
100%.
So it's just drivel.
Also, this idea that he wants everyone to succeed, you've never built anything, man.
I mean, you built a grift machine and you had your soft lenses and your lo-fi music and you became a state assemblyman who missed most of his votes.
And you've, I suppose, built like a communist jihadist machine that's taking over New York City.
But you've never actually built anything that employs anybody.
So to punish the 1%, the 1% are the people.
Who hire all sorts of people?
They hire a lot of people, and then these people have jobs, and then they spend money, and the money that they spend goes to other people's places of work.
And then, do you get it?
Anyway, here is Ken Griffin pushing back, saying he may do something in New York City, but Florida is where they are focusing.
So, the reason I wanted to show you that video is he's not saying I'm cutting and running altogether, right?
He's from New York.
He's saying we probably, but it's a bit of a debate.
We will see what happens there, right?
Because it's not that easy when you're deep in the financial world overnight to just extricate yourself from New York City.
Wall Street is still there, right?
These things don't happen overnight.
But he's saying probably, and it's a source of debate, and maybe it won't happen.
But what he is saying is he's thrilled that they're moving operations down here to Miami.
You know, I checked in with My real estate agent this morning, and he's a well known, high profile real estate guy who does New York and LA and Miami now.
And he told me that no one's buying in LA, nobody's buying in New York, and Miami is still going bananas commercially and residentially.
So it's one of those things where I can show you numbers all day long, like when people show you numbers about the economics of Cali and they show you numbers about the economics of Florida.
At the end of the day, where are people going and where are people leaving?
And we know that in the last five years, basically COVID on, in the last five years, Florida has gained 2.3 million people.
And it's because of, well, it's The guy that I'm going to show you a video of right now.
Ron DeSantis fixed this place.
He got his mojo during COVID and now he has just strengthened it and strengthened it.
Here he is with Hannity talking about how ridiculous Zorhan Mamdami is.
Right, so we'll get more to Obama in just a second because he's making the rounds suddenly because the Obama Presidential Library is opening up, which, by the way, you have to have an ID to get in, which is sort of hilarious.
But of course, DeSantis points that out.
What they do is they just say, We want affordable housing.
How are we going to get it?
We'll take more from them.
Oh no, they're leaving.
We don't have their money.
And oh, we've created this situation where to build new buildings, we have all these crazy regulations and everything else, and we tax the high hell out of the guys who are building it because they're corporations and there's nothing nastier and meaner than a corporation.
So, people don't even want to build there anymore.
Meanwhile, you come down here.
And I hate to make everything always about Florida, but it really is.
I don't hate to, but it seems almost thin in a certain way.
But it's like there are places where things work.
And when you have lower regulation and you let business people come in and you let companies compete for contracts and things of that nature, then things can get built quicker and they can be built more efficiently.
And then more companies want to get in on that because they see there is profit to be made.
So, Momdami is just the next version.
Of Obama, right?
Like, I said it the other day that, like, what the Democrats are becoming now is close to their final form.
Obama pushed all of the hope and change and universal health care, Obamacare, all of the stuff that just sounded good, but none of it actually worked.
Now they're in the wreck phase.
The wreck phase of it is what Mom Dami is doing, which is we're going to push all of these policies in a very micro way on a city.
We'll add a dash of jihad.
We'll add a dash of just mayhem on the streets and everything else.
And then, quite literally, we will punish.
And force out all of the decent, productive people.
Of course, it's not just New York.
I mean, this one is just wild.
There is this guy, James Tallarico, out of Texas, and he is the Democrat nominee to be senator from Texas, which is funny because, of course, Jasmine Crockett was going to try to get that seat, and she was as far left, bananas, liar, everyone's a racist, change the way she speaks depending on which audience she was talking to.
Like, all of the worst things.
She was it.
She was perfect.
And then this Tallerico guy said, You think you're crazy?
I'll show you what's what.
Well, here he is at a commencement speech, once again with this nonsensical drivel as it comes to who is paying taxes the fair share.
I don't know much about Quinn College, but how sad for any place of higher learning, which basically just turned these kids into Hamas supporters, that you would just allow a commencement speaker to come in and just lie about nonsense.
So again, there's the fair share thing, but allow me to read this tweet from Elon Musk.
They really don't like Elon Musk, the guy that's quite literally sending.
Us to other planets and building tunnels underneath so we can have better travel and giving us automated drivers.
Oh, he's got paraplegics that can literally play chess with their mind right now, but they really hate this guy.
Here's Elon.
I've paid over $10 billion in taxes in a single year more than anyone in history.
If I exercise and sell stock options, the combined federal and state tax is 45%.
I still pay California taxes for every day I spend there.
Then there is another 40% tax paid on my estate when I die.
Overall, I will probably end up paying trillions in taxes.
Well, that seems like his fair share.
That seems like enough for a guy that's productive.
I don't even know that we can get these numbers, but how many people work at Elon Musk owned companies?
If Elon even sold, I'll paraphrase what we're showing on the screen, Elon even sold a significant amount of his Tesla stock just to cover his 2021 tax obligations of $12 billion.
So you understand that?
Because his tax obligations were so high, he had to sell Tesla.
Stock in the company that he created.
He employs, wow, this is wild.
That's more than I would have thought.
If this is correct, he employs at his Elon Musk's own companies 146,000 people.
These are engineers, these are AI experts, these are highly technical people.
Some of them are salespeople at Tesla, which is not only a fantastic product, but every time I've been to the showroom, these are great people who love the product.
So let's keep punishing him.
And also, Tallarico.
Again, so you're upset that Elon has a helicopter or this guy has a boat.
You know, when they have these boats, they don't just get on the boat and there's nobody on the boat.
They often, if you've got a big ass yacht, I don't even think I've ever been on a yacht.
I think the biggest boat I've been on, maybe like a 20 person.
Oh, no, I've been on a cruise, but like I've never been on a rich person's yacht.
We got to make that happen.
But like, you know that there's a lot of people on the yacht that are, they have to serve the champagne and serve the foie gras.
They're downstairs shoveling the coal into the thing.
That's how they're doing these boats these days, right?
Anyway, I just want to show you a little bit more on just what so much of what we're talking about today is just about the misunderstanding of basic economics, right?
So much of this, the reason you have young people believing all of these stupid things is not just because Barack Obama and Zorhan Mandami are just saying it and they're falling for it, it's because they were taught all of the wrong things.
They don't understand anything about competition, they don't understand anything about supply and demand, they don't understand anything about how it's a spending issue with the government, not a revenue issue, right?
There's no number that they could get that would ever be enough.
To solve all the problems.
So I thought this was interesting.
This is sort of a very micro version of it.
There's a show called Financial Audit online.
It's sort of the Jerry Springer of finance podcasts, hosted by this guy, Caleb Hammer.
And watch, he gets into it with a couple lefties about grievance and patriotism and everything else.
unidentified
Watch this.
You're not patriotic?
With blue hair, you think I'm patriotic?
You can still be patriotic and be wrong about economics.
How can I be patriotic when we're spending more money on bombs than we are for social justice or like social programs?
We spend 50% of the federal spending on social programs.
Like what?
Social programs, Medicare, Medicaid, mandatory spending, SNAP benefits, veteran benefits.
Oh boy.
I love when people have no idea what they do and then they're just not patriotic.
It's like, dude, you're literally not a contributor.
You should be the most patriotic person.
You contribute nothing.
I mean, you contribute literally nothing.
You've only been a taker.
And yet you're the one that doesn't like the country.
Then the one that gives everything is the one that likes it.
Leap for where?
Anywhere.
I used to live in Germany.
Grass is always greener.
What would you be doing in Germany?
I could still be an artist there.
Yeah, you think Germans just immediately they're like, oh, you want to be an artist?
Let's give you $80,000.
Well, I know that they're not going to give me $80,000 a year for being an artist.
What do you think would all of a sudden happen?
I think if I was able to do my art full time, I'd be able to make the money I need to make.
Oh, a struggling artist that didn't get the money they wanted?
This could go a little awry.
First off, the level of testosterone in that video, but with that, very, very low.
We should look into that.
But you understand, this is standard stuff that she goes, well, with my hair like this, you think I'm patriotic?
Where else, lady?
Where else are you going to go that's going to be better than this?
It's the perfect example of why nobody, nobody leaves America.
The only two people I can think who left America are aging.
Comedic lesbians, Rosie O'Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres, and they're both back.
They couldn't take it.
Ireland was like, Listen to us, Rosie.
I know your last name's O'Donnell.
You're driving us freaking crazy.
Get out.
And where did Ellen go to?
The UK.
And you know, it turns out that the jihadists of the UK weren't thrilled, and she's back now too.
So, and they have unbelievable amounts of money, ridiculous, redonkulous amounts of money.
But if you're a blue haired person, Providing nothing to society with some imp sitting next to you, some eunuch sitting next to you, you should be on your knees thanking God that you live in America.
Yes, you're going to go to Germany.
What do you think the Germans are going to do for you over there?
As if the Germans don't have a bunch of problems, too, because all of their social services right now are going to the illegal immigrant.
Well, in their case, it should have been illegal immigrants in that they legalized a whole bunch of people that shouldn't have been legalized, but that's a whole other topic.
All right, let's get to Barack Obama.
He did an interview.
There's something so interesting about this.
He did an interview with Stephen Colbert.
Now, Stephen Colbert again, 16 mil a year, crappy ratings.
When's the show going off air officially?
Is it this week?
It's this month, I think.
We'll check on that.
But he does this interview with Obama, and there's no audience there.
So I want you to watch this and then also listen to how they pump in the applause and laughter, and then also whatever Obama says.
I'm worried about the Republican Party, not just the Democratic Party.
When I was president, people would ask me, well, what change would you like to see in Washington?
I'd say I'd love a loyal opposition.
I'd love a Republican Party that was conservative in some ways, that didn't agree with me on a whole bunch of stuff, but believed in rule of law and judicial independence and empirical evidence and science and wasn't constantly tapping into our worst impulses.
And there has been a Republican Party like that in the past, and I want to see that return because I think you have to have two healthy parties.
All right, first off, let's take that and put the Billy Madison.
That's the stupidest thing I ever heard in World Number for having heard it.
But did you catch what they did there?
They literally just put in canned applause.
Nobody was in that room with them.
Well, there's a key grip and a gaffer, I guess, but nobody's in that room.
They were just like, oh, Obama said something.
The people better realize that's a good thing to say.
Can you put in some applause?
Connor, can we put in some applause in something I say in moments?
Well, I'll just say something sort of generic and we'll make the audience.
They must be such idiots that if they hear applause in the background, they'll think I'm a genius.
Okay, let's try that in just a second.
Everything he accused the Republicans of, in that though, was what the Democrats are.
It's the Democrats who are using grievance.
It's the Democrats who don't care about rule of law.
It's the Democrats that aren't into science.
Does anyone remember COVID?
It's the Democrats that were working with big tech against the Constitution.
Like, in some sense, I admire your evil Barack Obama.
Let's prove that a little bit further.
Over in Maine, they've got a Nazi running, because, you know, why not?
They called us all Nazis, and then it turns out they were the Nazis.
Hot diggity damn.
They've got this guy, Graham Plattner, and as you know, he has the, well, he had the big Nazi SS tattoo on him, and there it is.
And that's what the SS officers wore when they were killing people.
He has subsequently changed it into a squid, which I'm pretty sure is Hydra from the Avengers, and those were the bad guys, so it's all very confusing.
But here he is, and tell me if this guy.
To the backdrop of what Barack Obama just said, he just wants a loyal opposition, and Democrats are pretty good and they love rule of law and everything else.
Look at this guy.
Listen to him.
Listen to the anger and the grievance and what he plans to do if he gets power.
But I would say that should be a warning to every Republican.
They are telling you what they are going to do, and they tell you we will pack the courts.
When they tell you we will make D.C. a state or we will make Puerto Rico a state, when they tell you we will get rid of ICE, when they tell you we will drag everybody in, you know, basically what he said there was find me the man, I'll find you the crime.
We will hamper the administration and make sure that everybody is either ending up in jail or caught up in all these things, caught up in endless legal nonsense.
This is what they do.
And then they tell you that we're the ones doing it.
Here's a perfect example of that.
Here's Obama, a little bit more from that interview, explaining that the White House.
Shouldn't direct the attorney general to go after prosecutions of people he doesn't like, but it's exactly what he did, and of course, he's blaming Trump for it.
Guys, it's almost impossible to listen to what Obama said there.
We did not put those laughs in.
The Colbert put those laughs and applause in as Obama's saying that.
Do you realize how absolutely insane that is?
It's a cue.
It's a cue.
I've been to these shows.
If any of you have been to these shows, they literally have a sign that says applause.
They have people that stand there.
I've got yelled at.
I mentioned this on the show.
My buddy Andrew, who's I'm sure watching the show today, we went to see Letterman.
And I love Letterman.
But we went to see Letterman back in 99.
And we got yelled at by a PA because we weren't applauding enough.
Like, they basically have a gun.
And they're like, we will shoot you if I'm pretty sure.
I think I saw that somewhere.
But to do a prepackaged interview and then lay in applause, how dim and dumb and pathetic do you think your audience is?
I guess.
Well, just about as dim and dumb and pathetic as they are.
Of course, everything that he's accusing Donald Trump of is exactly what he and his administration did.
We could show you a zillion headlines on this.
How about, you know, oh, the spies who lied and all these people, many of whom who worked for Barack Obama, like James Clapper right there in the middle and John Brennan right there in the middle, who worked to cover up the Hunter Biden laptop story?
Do you remember any of that?
Or how about this, Barry, Barry, Politico back in 2013, Eric Holder, who was your attorney general?
I'm still the president's wingman.
I'm the president's wingman.
Oh, a wingman?
You know what a wingman does at a bar?
A wingman at a bar makes his buddy look good so he could get laid.
That's how the wingman operates, okay?
So, what you're saying right there, Eric Holder, as Attorney General, is you were going to do what you needed to do so Barack Obama could get laid.
Where's Big Mike?
That's what you were going to do.
Donald Trump is not doing those things.
And for any of you that might be watching, go, but look what he's did to Comey.
Well, I think you can have an honest debate as to if a former FBI, director of the FBI, puts up something on Instagram that says 86.
47, which everyone knows means to get rid of, there's some debate as to whether that person should have some penalty to pay.
But do you think Donald Trump directed the DOJ to do it?
I would not be for that, but you've got to show me the evidence on that.
That's what you've got to do.
Of course, let's show this little chart here.
I don't have to get into all the details around all this, but this is, maybe we'll put this up on social as well so people can see it.
This is how they created.
The Russia intelligence, the entire hoax.
This is how they laundered it through the system, for those of you watching on the video podcast.
So, they, again, they are guilty of what they are accusing Trump and, in essence, all of us of.
And I would connect this to the Platner thing because this guy, he's just the neck, they are morphing into their final form.
And their final form will have a couple commi jihadis and it'll have a couple commi Nazis.
I don't know how it works out in the end for the commi jihadis and commi Nazis.
Probably not well.
Seems like it would have been a great 80s movie.
I suppose we shall see.
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All right, enough with the commies and the Nazis.
Just kidding.
We're going to talk about LA, and they got a bunch of them over there, too.
But they did have their mayoral debate last night.
And the key guy in all of this is this Spencer Pratt guy, who was basically a reality TV star, as far as I understand, completely apolitical.
And then he got, you know, what is a conservative?
A conservative is a liberal who gets mugged by reality.
Well, this guy got mugged and a half because his house and his parents' house burned down in the Pacific Palisades fire.
He has seen many of his friends and family flee the city.
Plenty of people like me did that.
They just could not take the crime and the drugs and the burning down of the things and everything else.
So he is now running as a Republican, which is obviously in L.A. is a major uphill battle.
But here he explains how he would have done.
Things differently, or how he would do things differently if LA was to face another wildfire, which obviously it will.
unidentified
Mr. Proud, a follow up here though.
What would you do moving forward that would make this better two years from now if we face the same situation?
What will you do so the horrible thing that happened that literally burned your house to the ground and your parents' house to the ground and destroyed hundreds of other homes and left all sorts of people homeless and everything else?
What will you do?
And he lays out, I have an idea.
I don't know, let's keep a little water in the reservoirs and a few other things.
In Pacific Palisades itself, the highest recorded gust was 38 miles per hour at 6 30 p.m. on January 7th, per the National Weather Service.
She's claiming that the winds were so high, about 100 miles an hour, that the helicopters could not get in there.
It is a complete lie.
And he knew it was a lie.
He called her out, and then you get the third grade teacher going, Would you just not say that?
Spencer continued.
And what I like about this guy is I like people, it's sort of what I like out of a guest these days.
I like people that get forced into the game, not people who are just like, I want to be famous or I want this or I want.
I like people who are just like normal people going about their lives.
Something happens, and then they suddenly have their moment of truth.
Right?
Like they suddenly see it and they're like, I will get involved.
And you can see it in this guy's face that that is what happened to him.
Here he is going after Nithya Raman.
Now, she is, if you think Karen Bass is an ineffective leftist ding dong, you're right.
But this woman is further left than her.
So this is the same thing as, oh, the New York City, you had Eric Adams, a sort of ineffectual leftist ding dong doing everything wrong, but he wasn't radical enough for the base, so they brought in Zorhan Mamdami.
And that's exactly what's happening to Karen Bass right now.
So this Nithya, she is.
She's leading in the polls right now, and here he is going after her.
This idea that if we just give them a bed, well, then they won't be homeless.
We'll have solved something because we'll just keep them inside.
It's completely absurd.
This is what Callie's been doing forever, right?
They pour money into these facilities or they pour money into we'll give them free needles or anything else.
But as he points out, they want fentanyl or super meth.
That sounds.
They want super meth, my God.
But he's right.
It's a massive, massive drug problem.
Anyone who has walked around those streets, and I love how he says, I'll go down there with her and she'll probably get stabbed.
That's the truth.
That is the actual truth.
And by the way, it's not just people, okay, well, it's just in Skid Row, and it isn't.
For any of you that have been in LA, it was all over the place.
Yes, it doesn't often get to the highest hilltop in the Hollywood Hills where all the super rich people live because generally fentanyl people who are bent over like this can't walk up the hill.
Maybe that's the plan with the rich people.
They're like, keep all of the poor people on fentanyl.
They'll be like this, and they won't be able to walk up to our houses.
However, when they're burning the crack or whatever they're doing, they might be able to burn the hill down, which wouldn't surprise me if that happens.
I thought this was good, too, and it gets to my point about that this guy's been forced into this.
He is asked whether he wants an apology, and watch this.
unidentified
People were wondering should the candidates next to you have apologized to you that you did lose your home, that you basically lost everything in the Palisades Fire?
We start there because this is what brought you to this campaign, Spencer.
Is there somebody that's been fairly popular for the past decade that that reminds you?
Yeah, it does.
I'm not saying he has the entire skill set of Donald Trump, but Donald Trump obviously is one of a kind, and we will literally never have anyone like him ever again on this planet Earth.
There will just be nobody like Donald Trump.
Truly one of a kind.
Nobody can fill those shoes.
But the origin story here is kind of right.
Why are all these horrible things happening?
Watch those Donald Trump videos, 1980s, Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey.
Will you run for president?
All this stuff is screwed up.
And he's going, Well, nobody seems to be fixing it.
I hope I don't have to run.
And I think he actually meant it.
And then eventually, push came to shove, and he said, I will go ahead and do it.
And that's exactly what this guy is doing here.
So now let's get to some of the things that Donald Trump is doing right now.
We do have a little bit of an update on the Iran war.
It sounds like there is a memo now going back and forth.
As you know, we have ended Epic Fury.
We've ended the military portion of the war.
We're moving into an, well, we're right in the midst now, I would say, of a, Of an economic portion.
That is the blockade.
We control all of the oil right now.
Nobody's getting through Strait of Hormuz without us.
Iran can't export anything.
China cannot be happy about that.
You guys get all that stuff.
Here's Fox with a bit more on this 14 point memo that could potentially end this whole thing.
The Wall Street Journal reports the two sides are hammering out a 14 point memorandum laying a framework for a month long period of talks, which could resume next week in Islamabad.
Former NSC Chief of Staff under President Trump, Alex.
Alex Gray joins me now.
Alex, good morning to you.
So, one of the latest messages from the president on this comes from Truth Social.
He writes, assuming Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to, which is perhaps a big assumption, the already legendary epic fury will be at an end.
And the highly effective blockade will allow the Hormuz Strait to be open to all, including Iran.
We've got the details of this 14 point plan, according to Axios.
Under the banner, U.S. and Iran closing in on one page memo to end the war, we've got these a five year ban on nuclear enrichment.
Which would be less than the 20 year ban President Trump previously said he didn't like.
There would be limits of 4% enrichment after that.
There would be a ban on underground nuclear facilities, a vow to never seek a nuclear weapon, commitment to enhanced nuclear inspections, and an end to restrictions on travel through the Strait of Hormuz.
President Trump, though, is telling the New York Post it's too soon right now to schedule a new round of in person talks with Iran.
So this is a very high stakes game of telephone, still led by Steve Witkopf and Jared Kushner.
So 60% is nuclear, and remember, for weapons grade.
And remember, when Steve Witkopf was having the negotiations with the Iranians before the war, He said, so we can either take his word for it or not, he said that they said they were already enriching to that level.
You have to take that with a grain of salt, right?
But okay, we're going to say you can't do anything for five years, and then after that you can do 4% so that you can have civilian use.
Ban on underground nuclear facilities.
Now that seems good, and that seems like something we can track with satellites and drones and everything else.
That no more of this underground stuff, which they've been doing for a long time, because that's where they can hide stuff.
So that seems like something with a little teeth there.
A vow to never seek nuclear weapons.
Well, again, are you taking their word for it?
Like, you got to kind of prove it.
And also, remember, Donald Trump has max two and a half years left.
We likely, not likely, let's say it's 50 50 right now, flip a coin on whether we get a Republican or a Democrat, but we could get a Democrat jihadi regime here, and then they could sell them the nukes.
So who the hell knows?
Commitment to enhance nuclear inspections.
Again, you need something.
It's like trust but verify, and end restrictions on travel.
Through the straight.
The straight would then be open.
So, the point of all this is I'm not saying you go into all this just like, oh, we just got a piece of paper and it's great.
Like, a piece of paper is only worth what it's printed on.
But there are some parameters now that could get us out of this.
But beyond all of that, by the way, their economy is in shambles.
They can't fund terror all over the world right now.
Their proxies like Hezbollah are largely crushed.
So their ability to threaten all of their neighbors has been hugely hampered.
And I think they also realize boy, if we go back to that stuff, at least while Trump is in office, we are going to be in big doo doo.
Here is Trump with a bit more on the status of the negotiations.
unidentified
You're facing an opponent right now in Iran that has refused to submit.
You seem optimistic now that we may be closer to a deal.
What's different about this moment now than in other moments where a deal has seemed close?
I feel like that's like, for these ass monkeys that are always, that seems, you could say that on cable, on NBC, you could say ass monkey.
For these ass monkeys that are always saying Donald Trump has, can I get a round of applause for ass monkey?
For these ass monkeys.
Or he's lost a step or these idiots who get on CNN and say these things.
It's like Donald Trump right there.
He laid out serious numbers and percentages and they maybe have 18, 19 percent of the ballistic missiles.
Like, you know, I'm always telling you Donald Trump's good at the bumper sticker stuff and then guys like Marco fill in the blanks on everything.
That was Trump filling in an awful lot of blanks.
Like, like Navy gone, Air Force gone, et cetera, et cetera.
And his point was, we've got them over the barrel.
As I said yesterday, pun intended, we've got them over the barrel and we will now see what comes out of it.
I want to jump back to something else that we covered on yesterday's show.
It's how we opened and closed the show, which was a bit about Marco Rubio because his star is really shining right now.
I think it was a really clever move.
I mean, man, does Trump still get TV and media.
To have Marco do the White House press briefing yesterday while Carolyn Louette was out was really a stroke of genius.
Two days ago he did it.
And what it allowed for was people to see that Marco has a ridiculously good command, not only of the issues, but of what America is.
And we're going to need to sell.
The positive vision of America to people, particularly as we roll into these midterms.
So it's not just that Marco, you know, there's this meme of that Marco's always sitting in the White House and he's got a different hat on and different outfit for every freaking job that he's doing.
It's not just that he is Secretary of State and it's not just that he's acting as press secretary.
Here he is over at the Vatican, I think this is yesterday, meeting with Pope Leo.
Now, the reason I'm showing you that, we don't know anything about that meeting yet, as far as I know, but Marco obviously is Catholic.
There has obviously been some tension between this Pope, who has been, I would say, he has been, I think, unnecessarily political, particularly when it comes to Trump and border and deportations, right?
Like the Vatican has walls and things of that nature.
It seems to be a little more aggressive when it comes to Trump on these things, but maybe, maybe Marco's soothing some of that over.
And I thought this was interesting as per Polymarket, Republican presidential nominee 2028.
Well, JD, which obviously he's the heir apparent, obviously.
He's the popular vice president to a very popular president.
He's at 39%, but Rubio's at 24%.
And that just doesn't matter.
It's way too early to talk about this.
I don't even have to have an opinion on it or anything.
But if you just think of the bench, you got JD, you got Marco.
Sense, but like I could support Heg Seth in a second.
Maybe DeSantis gets back in.
Like, give me one more good, decent Republican that we could throw in the mix on that.
Anyone in the administration.
Yeah, like maybe Bobby's willing to do it again.
He probably won't or tall.
Like, it doesn't even matter.
The point is there are sensible people that you may not disagree with everything, but there are sensible people on that side, and that is just wildly contrasted with what's going on with the left.
All right, let's put that there and jump over to a RubenReport.locals.com community QA.
Joseph sitting right there with a Wire attached to his computer that I'm told goes to a series of pipes that Al Gore created 30 years ago that are something like the internet.
And if you want to get a question in live, you can jump on our locals page and do that.
A different view says Dave, I know you grew up in Long Island, New York.
I grew up in Ocean County, New Jersey.
Have you ever been to the Jersey Shore?
And if so, did you ever go to Seaside Heights, Point Pleasant Beach, Long Beach?
Yeah, I've been to all of them.
I've been to all of them.
We used to go to the Jersey Shore all the time in the summer.
I had friends.
Oh, look, well, there's the.
That is not a picture of me when I was younger.
That's the Jersey Shore cast with their serious tans and everything else.
But yeah, most of my beach time as a kid was spent at Jones Beach and the Long Island beaches, obviously.
But we used to go to Jersey.
Most of my family, actually, although I grew up in Long Island, most of my extended family lived in Jersey, so we used to do a ton of Jersey stuff.
I just have a great affinity for Jersey.
Jersey's always the butt of every joke.
And what did they say in Golden Girls?
I think Sophia says it's the only state with a state smell.
Like you literally are driving into Jersey and it suddenly starts smelling.
But when you think of.
All the mafia stuff that I love, and Italian food and culture, and there's just all of that kind of thing.
And the attitude, there's a Jersey style attitude that Long Island has in a very similar way, but Long Island has it, and it's like we're still New Yorkers, where Jersey has this attitude, and they're not quite New Yorkers, right?
So there's something there.
But I used to go to all of those places Wildwood is one of them, the Jersey Shore.
I think I went there too.
And yeah, ate a lot of sandwiches and drank a lot of 40s on the beach over there.
Glenn says, I would like Whoopi to keep it up and keep scaring her moronic fans from voting.
We need more informed voters voting, not idiots who watch her show.
Do you think she's scaring people away from voting, though?
That's the question, right?
So they are scaring people all the time, right?
Like there's an endless, endless, that's what they do.
They scare people and they lie.
The question is, do those People are those people literally like afraid to go out and vote, then, or are they so ginned up on fear that they actually vote?
You know, using fear as a tactic, it's a pretty nasty game that you're playing, but you know, it could get people out there voting.
Like, if you're like, oh my God, I have to vote because Nazi Hitler fascist guy is coming, like, you might vote.
You know, I saw the comments yesterday, and people are still on this.
You know, it's like 50 50 with The View.
It's good content in a way, and it's fun to make fun of them.
But people are also like, you know, we should just start ignoring them, and we probably should a little bit more.
And it's one of the back and forth we always do when we're figuring out the content.
But it's just really sad what happened to that show.
Barbara Walters, who was a great, she was an actual journalist, and that she created that show to be a place where people could come together and women from all walks of life.
Could have shared their different opinions, and that became this hysterical harpy, just awful institution of evil.
It's a shame.
Craft Cat says, Dave, what's your favorite Star Wars quote?
I mean, there's so many, but I'm going to slightly wait.
So I'll give you one, I'll give you my real one, and then the funny one.
You get triple guacamole today if you get that quote from the prequels.
You know what I'm talking about already.
That's the silly one.
My favorite quote from the originals is never tell me the odds.
Remember, they're on the Millennium Falcon and they're flying into the asteroid belt, and C3PO is like, the odds of surviving is 300.
And Han Solo, never tell me the odds.
It's just got such great grit, and it's everything.
Part of the reasons that the last three movies sucked is they didn't have a Han Solo type character.
It's why Force Awakens, that had Han Solo, was pretty good, and then the other two just dumped out, which I read yesterday online.
I don't know if you've seen this, I don't know if it was a rumor.
But people are saying that they now realize how bad the three new ones were, that they're considering, Disney is actually considering removing them from the canon, basically just wiping them away, and then starting over a little bit closer to what George Lucas's actual sequels were going to look like.
But my favorite quote you have the image, my favorite quote from the prequels I don't like sand.
It's coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere.
Look, George wasn't the greatest when it came to romantic dialogue.
That's when they're falling in love and she likes to go to the beach.
I don't like sand.
Oh, and a runner up?
You've got a runner up for me?
You're thinking you're some people gonna die?
Oh, that was pretty good.
That was pretty good.
That was on the fly.
You get triple gloss.
You see, how long have we been working together now?
All I had to say was I'm thinking of a prequel quote.
And you got it like that.
That's impressive, man.
Rapsack says, Hey, Dave, don't have a question for you, but just wanted to say, sure to appreciate that first look in the morning that you've been doing.
It's really great.
Really appreciate it.
Oh, I'm thrilled to hear that.
You know, we started doing this a couple of weeks ago.
We had been discussing it a while.
If you have not seen this yet, it's in your feed.
And, you know, particularly if you're watching on YouTube, it's probably not getting to your feed, even if you're subscribed, because they're going on your viewing habits.
And we put it up at 4 45 in the morning, right?
So all it is, it's eight to 10 minutes of the three or four most important stories straight up.
Not silly or anything else, just to give you a little bite.
The whole idea was if you don't have time for an hour long show during a day or you just want a little bit of news in the morning, so you're getting into conversations during the day and you have some sense of what's going on, that's what we're doing.
We try to make it pleasant and thoughtful, and that's it.
And by the way, you can go to daverubin.com where we're also doing articles that our staff is writing so that if you want just news that is nonpartisan, like it's just straight up stuff.
But that'll just give you something that you can share with people.
But I'm really enjoying First Look.
But anyway, the more you click it on YouTube, the more it'll actually be fed into your algorithm.
But if you're downloading the podcast on Spotify, et cetera, it should be right there.
And we're getting great feedback, so I'm really happy about that.
Bad Wolf says I asked Grok for a list of podcasters who don't hate Israel and also don't hate Russia.
The list came back with three names.
That's it Jordan Peterson, Lex Friedman, and Dave Rubin.
Huh.
How is that possible?
This not hate Israel Russia thing seems pretty consistent with the Trump 47 core team.
So, why is all the internet lost in their minds when it comes to both Russia and Israel?
They're wildly different reasons that they've come to my mind.
Look, I don't hate Russia.
Putin is not a great guy.
And, you know, you cannot, not cannot, you can.
But generally speaking, when nations have sovereign borders, if you invade a nation with a sovereign border, that's not what a good guy does, in a sense, right?
Now, it's a little more complex when it comes to Ukraine and Russia because there was the Soviet Union.
Where these borders did not exist until the Soviet Union fell.
And there are many people in Ukraine who consider themselves Russian, and the languages are different.
So saying there's just sovereign borders, like these countries have nothing to do with each other, it's not that easy.
First off, I have tons of Russian friends, actually.
And I was born in Brooklyn in New York, even though we moved to Long Island quickly, but everybody in Brooklyn at the time was Russian, basically.
I have nothing against the Russian people.
I think Putin is the best I can say about Putin.
Is that he is also doing something that I think Trump is trying to do, which is keep the globalists off his back.
So the closer NATO gets to his borders, the more he's going, boy, I'm not thrilled with this.
So there has to be some resolution there.
My guess is it's the same thing that I said if you watch.
You just have that sitting in your head just like that?
March of 22?
Look at it.
Man, these guys are sharp.
Everyone never had coffee this morning or what?
March of 22.
So, all right.
So over three years ago, if you watch my videos on it, I'm sure I was saying the exact same thing.
Like, Putin, not a great guy.
Ukraine likely has to give up some sort of territory here.
By the way, there was so much corruption in Ukraine related to Hunter Biden and getting rid of the prosecutor and all that stuff.
But no, I don't hate Russia.
And look, on the Israel thing, look, Megyn Kelly's doing it for clicks.
She would sell her kid for a click at this point.
She's now defending Islam and everything else.
And if you just care about clicks, yeah, there are way more Muslims than Jews.
But what a sad and cynical way to.
To do a program.
I just think that's pretty awful.
Most Americans understand what's going on here.
There is a battle for the West.
You don't have to particularly care about the Jews.
You don't have to particularly care about Israel.
You don't.
You really don't as an American.
But what you should care for is the idea of Western civilization.
And Israel represents Western civilization in a place that is not very friendly to it.
Although I think when Trump is done with the Iran war, it will be a lot more friendly to it.
They know if they can get Israel, all right, so you do another Holocaust, get Israel, or get the Jews or whatever, it's like, then it's on for.
You know how quickly the rest of the West will fall?
Like, the Jews have been fighting the bad guys for thousands of years.
That's what happens.
You know, when they say, oh, the Jews got kicked out of all these countries, how did it work out in the end for all of those countries?
When I was in Australia, I kept at the QA's at the events several times.
I got questions about, you know, do you think Jews have a future in Australia?
And my answer to that basically was, well, only if Australia has an Australian future.
The Jews have been a major part of Australia and have done extraordinary things as Jews usually do in most of the societies that they are in.
And if it ends for the 100,000 remaining Jews in Australia, well, the day after that, do you think it's better for the average Australian or it's worse?
And the answer is obviously worse.
Teresa says, Why does the Democratic Party want to destroy America?
What do they benefit from doing that?
Is it because their party has been taken over by jihadists or they genuinely hate America?
Well, look, this is where it's hard to know what is in everyone's mind and heart.
But when I keep saying that the Democrats are morphing into their final form, what I mean is, you know, they had the sort of, you had.
Obama with hope and change.
You had Medicare for everybody.
We'll solve all your problems.
We don't want war.
It's all just kind of like low level.
It sounds good.
And if your population is not particularly bright, they will vote for it, even if in the end they're going to have to pay for it, literally and figuratively, and if it's going to infringe on their rights and everything else.
If they don't even know what their rights are in the first place, oh my God, someone got shot.
We should take away guns, right?
So, what do they want?
What do the actual Democrats now want?
Well, I think that the Democrat Party, as right now as it stands, it's morphing into its final form.
And its final form is the progressives.
The alliance between progressives and Islamists is doing this.
It's doing this right now, right?
It's tightening up.
It's gooey, but it's becoming its final form, whatever that may be.
And that's much like what happened to the Labour Party in the UK, completely taken over.
And then suddenly, what happens?
The queers for Palestine go, oh my God, you know, I'm starting to think that these Islamists don't like us very much.
And that's going, so it will collapse at some point.
But I would also say for all of us, and it's most of us, it's most of America that loves this country, that does not want overreaching progressive government, that certainly doesn't want Sharia law or anything else.
Like, we just got to stand up now.
You got to stand up while you can.
You don't want to wait till you're in a situation like the UK is or like Germany or France is, where it's much, much worse.
We have better protections, we have states' rights, we have guns in this country, like we were born out of revolution.
So I think we have a stronger force field against evil, but that does not mean it's not happening here.
And I wonder, you know, at the end of the day, I wonder, a guy like Bernie Sanders, let's just say he really believes all his stuff, he really just believes in socialism, which it seems fairly obvious, he's a true believer, it doesn't matter how many times he's proven wrong.
I don't know that he thought, boy, I'd be ushering in Islamism too.
So is it a little weird for Bernie Sanders when he's hanging out with all the Islamists and they're Endlessly.
Now, he hates Israel too, and when they come for the Jews, I hope that Israel won't let Bernie in.
But is it a little weird for him to be hanging out with these people all the time and going, boy, did I, maybe I opened the door a little bit too much on this thing?
But the left never knows when the left goes too far, so here we are.
Doc Ransom says, How's your knee doing?
Is there going to be a need to redo the treatment in a few years?
For example, does the treatment wear off or wear out?
So, as you guys know, it was a year ago last month.
It was, well, the treatment I got a year ago last month, last April, but it was in February of 25.
Blew out my knee playing basketball.
Every crack, popple, pop, glass sounded like stepping on Rice Krispies.
I thought I was never playing again.
I got in contact with a wonderful stem cell doctor, Dr. Richie Striano.
Injected me, I think, in 14 different places.
I had tears.
I also was having major shoulder playing ball.
I was loading up on Advil before, which is not good to do.
He looked at my shoulder.
My shoulder was hanging on by like the tiniest little bit.
Injected stem cells there.
My shoulder is 100%.
My knee's 100%.
I still play with a compression.
Thing you know, that's just like the sleeve.
I really don't need to do it, it's just out of habit at this point.
But I played ball last night for three hours in this freaking Florida heat, and it was really hot last night.
The freaking sweat of 1800 calories.
I'm playing great.
I love it.
You know, rolling into my big 5 0 next month.
So, to answer your question, though, no, you don't have to redo it as long as you don't tear anything again, right?
Which certainly could be.
As he said to me, you could do maintenance every now and again.
I've been thinking the other, you know, stem cells are pretty expensive and it's, you know, they're going to, they have to inject you in a lot of ways.
It's not the most fun procedure in the world.
A more easy way to do maintenance.
So, this is for anyone, for anyone that's having any joint stuff, you got a little tear in something or whatever.
PRP, platelet rich plasma.
I do it for my hair also.
They take your blood, right?
They take your blood out.
We've all had blood taken out.
They take your blood out.
They spin it in a centrifuge.
They separate your blood from the plasma.
And then they inject the plasma back into you.
It does incredible things related to anti inflammatory and healing.
It gets your system boosted again.
The other thing that people are doing now is there's PRP, there's stem cells, and there's what's the other thing?
Exosomes.
People are doing exosomes now.
Obviously, there's a lot on the peptide side, which I'm still.
I kind of like the idea, but I'm seeing a lot of weird stuff too.
And I feel like in a few years, everyone's going to be like, oh, yeah, yeah, look what you did with peptides.
You know, you got the six pack and, you know, everything feels great.