The Joe Rogan Experience - #713 - Dave Rubin

Episode Date: October 26, 2015

Dave Rubin is a stand-up comedian, talk show host, and television personality. He is the creator and host of political comedy talk show The Rubin Report, part of Ora TV and formerly of The Young Turks Network. http://www.youtube.com/rubinreport

And we're live! Dave Rubin. I'm trying to shut this fucker. Shut that fucking thing off for two seconds. Jesus. We are here to celebrate the fact that Chris Christie got kicked off of a quiet train this morning for talking on his phone while drinking a McDonald's strawberry shake. And this is the guy who wants to ban pot.

How about ban yourself, you fucking slob? How dare you? How dare he drink a McDonald's strawberry shake in public? After. In light of everything. Not only that, after having his stomach stapled. Yeah. It didn't really take.

Yeah. You know? You can stretch those bitches out. You can? Yeah. But do you have to do something? You think he's doing something? You just keep eating.

You just keep plowing through. I know a guy who's blown through two of them. He's had it done twice and blown through it both times. So you actually tear open the staples? Is that actually- I haven't done any MRIs or operations on these people. I thought we were going to go heavy medical stuff today. Surgery and shit.

It's been explained to me, Dave Rubin, the skin is flexible. And if you just keep stretching that bitch out, it's clearly when, with these people, like I have a friend and, uh, his friend is a friend of mine as well, but a good friend of his, and he was about, he's about to go do this. And I said, please try to talk him out of it because you don't need surgery. You just need to change your life because the surgery is only going to fix the physical aspect of it. There's a reason why you're stuffing all this sugar and fat.

You're addicted to food. So you need to find out what it is, what's going on. So you're talking about the psychological part of the emotion part. Yeah, I think that's where it's really at. I don't think it is the physical thing. I think the physical thing is a manifestation of a psychological issue. For sure, you get physically addicted to shitty food. Like, I quit sugar recently. I food. Like I quit sugar recently.

Shouldn't say I quit sugar because I had a little this weekend. So I didn't quit it. But I removed it from my primary diet. And I quit it altogether for two weeks. And what happened to me five days in was really shocking. Because I had a massive headache. Like five days in. The cravings were freaky.

And my head was killing me. And it's like snapples and protein bars and low-fat milk. There's all this shit that has sugar in it. Everything. Granola. You think of granola as healthy. Yeah. And then I would look at it.

I'm like, 20 grams of sugar in a fucking serving of granola. And I usually have two servings. Uh-huh. Yogurt. Look, it's not even sugar what we do we do in america we do high fructose corn syrup yeah i don't know if to illuminate you on this but in our coke in our can of coke because it's cheaper to put corn in it to sweeten it we're drinking corn instead of sugar that's why people get mexican cokes yeah you know what i mean you

go to a fancy restaurant here in la they give give you a Mexican Coke because that has real sugar. Think how just warped our whole system is. The corn thing, we could do five hours on corn because corn is, you know, it's in wallpaper, it's in everything. It's amazing. And, you know, you're trying to get off sugar, but what you're really trying to

get off is corn. There's definitely that as well. But I think even just simple sugar it's like even like i read this one thing it's like uh i forget what the product was but it was one of the ingredients was pure cane sugar like you're selling me something amazing well that's pepsi now they pure cane sugar like holy shit sugar it's still sugar but it's still your body doesn't necessarily differentiate it's still sugar real salt you know like that's that's, but it's still your body doesn't necessarily differentiate. It's still sugar salt You know like that's that's how dumb that's how dumb people have become about food

We were talking a little bit about food before you know But like it's really it's like the most important stuff what you put into your body So that then you can function on this earth and now we're so warped. We got corn instead of sugar Even just now. So I told you, I drank like 17 coffees before, but I didn't put any. You have Stevia and everything. I just went straight black, nothing. I've been drinking straight black lately too.

But it's actually, you know, I had this guy, Peter Giuliano on at one point, who's a real coffee expert. And when you talk to a guy like that and you talk about putting cream in the coffee you can see his face like oh what are you doing yeah like to him it's it's a sacrilege almost so what would he say to drink it what's the best black just black that's it yeah and i've been drinking it black i actually prefer it um what in a method that this guy rob wolf created which is you mix it with grass-fed butter i was doing mct oil the problem is for a method that this guy Rob Wolf created, which is you mix it with grass-fed butter. I was doing it. And MCT oil.

The problem is, for a podcast, it gives me phlegm. And I start... In the middle... And it's annoying as fuck for people that are listening. But it's pretty damn delicious. It's very good. Yeah. I still do that,

but I just don't do it before a podcast anymore. So I did it for about six months. I was doing the grass-fed butter and coconut oil, just like a teaspoon of coconut oil. And it's amazing. And I did it. I did it for about six months. I was doing the grass fed butter and coconut oil, just like a teaspoon of coconut oil. And it's amazing. And you feel great and it's delicious and all that. But I did over the course of about six months, I probably gained like eight pounds from all the butter. It's, it's a lot of calories to be plowing in the morning, but it does do some good things. I think it has something to do with how the caffeine actually ingests into your body. It slows it down. So you don't get that like burst of energy and crash and all that which was all great but you know eight pounds in six

months that is a lot to gain for most people it dulls their appetite didn't dull your appetite um no not really i don't give up i live in west hollywood i there's a certain amount of working out i have to do not not jo Rogan level, but you know. Just to stay in the neighborhood, a certain amount. Have you ever walked down Santa Monica in the middle of West Hollywood? I live in the gayest place on earth. I've never seen so many Daisy Dukes in one spot. Well, first off, I'm considered morbidly obese by these people's standards because they starve themselves. I don't understand.

For people listening, Dave Rubin's a very slim man. Yeah, if you're just listening. Very slender and fit. The thing is, these guys, it's the gayest place on earth and these guys work on their bodies

all day long. You should not be carrying a dog. They carry their dogs, these Opsalopsas and all these other fans. Your bicep shouldn't be bigger than your dog.

You know what I mean? That just shouldn't be. And you shouldn't be carrying, I have a pit bull. She's not, you know, my bicep's not bigger than her. I think that's a healthy way to do it. But yeah, in West Hollywood, these guys, they, I don't know how do you starve yourself and have huge muscles? I just know it's all steroids. It's steroids. That certainly helps. Yeah. Um, you can, there's, there's some stuff that, that uh fighters have been caught with that uh i think it's called there's one called clenbutrol and another called stenozol i think and the idea behind that stuff the clen i think is supposed to like really just lean you out it's

a bodybuilder thing and the stenozol allows you to keep mass on or helps you assist you in keeping mass on when you cut weight so for fighters that are trying to be like the biggest in their weight class right they're dehydrating themselves but they want to keep as much muscle mass as possible that can't be good for long-term health right so bad for your body i mean i i see it with these guys and it's like you know they're doing this just so that they can get somebody that has a better body than them so they can fuck and then they move on to the next one it's like this endless game you know what i mean like i got a hot body he's got a hot body i'll fuck him now i moved like it's just this you're climbing

this ladder yeah it's like icarus you know what i mean you're just going up and up and up but one day this thing is just going to blow up in your face yeah but you know that could be a sex if you look at life though like life is this temporary right? You have maybe 50 years of people actually wanting to have sex with you. Right? Yeah. If you're fucking so lucky, you take care of everything. So that's, like, from 18 to, like, when you're closing in on 70, everybody that fucks you is just doing you charity. And that's the saddest.

That's the saddest. I see this, these overly tanned, hair-plugged guys that are 70 years old and they're still at the gym hoping that that 28-year-old is looking at them. And instead they're staring at everyone and gawking at them horribly. It's all gross, it's really sad. We can get into this a little later,

but it also shows me why the gay marriage thing was so important Mm-hmm because these are I actually have a lot of empathy for these people although I can you know It's easy to make fun of but like if you couldn't ever enter a relationship That then is good You're gonna build like what you have with your wife where you can build a life, you know And you can have kids and move forward in life. Well, then if all you have is just fucking

You just keep doing it. As many guys as possible, rotations, different ones texting you all day long, trying to put it together. Yeah. Trying to figure out when you could squeeze the time in. You know, exactly. And I guess, you know, it feels good in the moment. But for the long-term health of just like what being a human is. Not so great. But I think, you know, interestingly enough, if you look at the perspective of like a full long life,

like it's just a bunch of moments. It's just like trying to maintain happiness at a certain level as much as possible. And you could be Chris Christie where you're addicted to McDonald's shakes and being a fat slob. Doesn't he have an advisor? No, he doesn't.

Isn't there an advisor that says- He's too much ego. He doesn't listen. Yeah. Or you could try to fill yourself up with that and be married and have kids and have that part of your life achieve normalcy. Or you can do the super tan, roided up, dick sucking rampage that those guys that work out at Gold's Gym on's gym on coal do you

know that that spot i don't know that one but dude when i was on news radio yeah um i we used to work out uh we used to work at sunset and gower that was the studio yeah and gold's gym was right down the street so sometimes we'd have off like two hours during the middle of the day where they had to rewrite scripts or stuff like that so i'd just shoot over to gold's get a workout in and come back but it is the fucking gayest gym it's not it's it's a ferocious disco is what it is it's just a bunch of men with scrunchie socks on and timberlands and like super short shorts and just the tightest tank tops and you walk in there like a wounded antelope just gingerly stepping close to the water hole but how did you feel there because you're in good shape but you're in good shape right like you care

about your body right you're doing the right things but you go in there and you see these guys and you you does it completely like oh fuck like i'm a fat fuck no it wasn't that at all i was i was in my 20s when i was doing that this is was when I was on news radio. But I was fucking being targeted. That was the problem. Guys were like, you could have 20 pounds on the bar. Guys were like, I'll spot you. I don't need a spot, dude. Just get your fucking balls from above my head.

They would literally, you'd be on the bench and dudes would just put their dick above your head to grab the bar. They just wanted their dick in proximity with your face. You know, like when you're doing bench press. They can literally bench press with their cocks. I bet they can.

Yeah. This was pre-Viagra, too, you got to think. Because this was in the 90s. These poor bastards were going on the natch. And when it went bad, then they had cock pumps. And was it a Liberace movie with Michael Douglas? Behind the candelabra, yeah. They used to have implants, I guess. pumps and there was a Liberace movie with Michael Douglas. Like he had some sort of implant. Behind the candelabra.

Yeah. Yeah. They have, they used to have implants, I guess. Back in those days, those poor guys. I had no idea we were going to start like this. I didn't either. That's the beauty of this show. That is.

Let that bitch run. Yeah. But I, for a brief moment, not, not entirely because I can defend myself, but I felt what it was like to be a woman that was pursued by men. Yeah. Because men are fucking gross. Yeah gross yeah well that's the thing it has nothing it has nothing to do with gay or straight it's a man thing so if you happen to be a man into men yes well congratulations you just got welcomed to that world and you were treated like a woman so i have great sympathy for women that

have to deal with this shit i got treated like a woman with a gun. It's like, you know, like, okay, all right, relax, relax. You know, because I wasn't vulnerable physically. Yeah. Because I was like, dude, stop. Yeah. And then it's two dudes looking at each other, and I'm like, you know, come on, man, get the fuck out of here. It wasn't like a woman who, like, could physically be overpowered by this guy. It was like a guy saying, I'm going to kick your ass if you don't stop trying to fuck me yeah like stop were

you always amazed at their relentless relentless tenacity to never take a cue Joe Rogan not into it and they can never take the cue right yeah it was only a few guys most guys would figure out that you were straight and they were respectful yeah the vast majority. But it only takes, if there's 300 guys working out at the gym, it only takes two guys to fuck up the entire experience. Less than 1%. Yeah. And they'll just, but those are the ones that are just like, they're going to go for it.

But there's probably 50 other guys that are trying to work their way into the friend zone. Which is what women experience. What women experience is a bunch of guys. I can't tell you, especially when I was younger and I was single, how many fucking girls that I dated who would work with some guy who would say, well, Mike from the office says, I'd be like, Mike's trying to fuck you. Yeah. Mike's trying to fuck you.

He's not even a real person. He's not even a real person. Mike's wearing a Kabuki mask and he's doing a fucking dance. It's a mating dance. That's not what he thinks. This is bullshit. Stop it. Meanwhile, I got to go to the gym and deal with that.

Mike would marry me. Mike is a fucking idiot. Jesus. But that's what it's, I mean, it's, there's a reason why there's 7 billion of us. Because this drive to procreate and not even on a conscious level. It's not like, oh my God, I have to get this girl pregnant and have a baby. It's like, I've got to come inside of her. I have to come.

I have to figure out how to get this person to touch my body and create pleasure. You don't take the objective steps to recognize, oh, this is a gigantic biological trick that's been set in place by nature because it was really hard to survive just a few thousand years ago it was insanely hard to survive and you had to make sure you made as many people as possible so that they made as many people as possible so we can keep this retarded party going that's what it is that's what it is at the end of the day that's what it is and that's why it keeps getting dumber i'm sure you've seen idiocracy you ever see idiocracy like you know

what i honestly haven't seen it I've only seen clips of it. But I had a bit that people accused me of stealing from Idiocracy. But luckily, I did the bit before Idiocracy came out. So I got grandfathered in. That's the comedian's dilemma. When you're doing good shit so that 10 years later, everyone's like, oh, you must have stole that. And you're like, no, no, no.

I did that 10 years ago. Well, it wasn't that close. It was just the concept that many people have had is that dumb people are outbreeding smart people. That's the movie. Mine was that it explained the pyramids. My thing was that the idiot pyramid workers would show up one day and go, I was supposed to get my check on Friday. Where is everybody? But all the smart people who figured out how to build the pyramids had already died.

Yeah. And that we had to, so the people just moved into the pyramids. Like, why are we living in these mud houses when we can live in the pyramids? So they moved into the pyramids and pretended they built it. And there's this long thing that sort of explains what's going on today. Yeah. And I think that we all think at a certain level that that's true, that there's way more dumb people than there are smart people.

And we all think that we benefit from people like Elon Musk and innovators and geniuses. But how many of them are there? Not many. Not many. Not many. It's a tiny, tiny number. Yeah. Well, listen, I just got gay married like a month ago. I love how you say gay married. I have to say, well, first off, people don't believe that I'm gay. They just simply don't accept it. Why don't they accept it? They say I don't act gay. I play sports. I don't, you know, like I got this at the Gap. You know it? They say, I don't act gay. I play sports. I don't, you know, like, I got this at the Gap. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not, like, gay like that. You didn't go to Amber Comber and Fitch and get assaulted with that smell that they zap

you with when you walk in there? You know, it's funny. I know that smell. I used to be afraid when I was closeted, like, in high school and college, because I didn't come out until really my mid to late 20s. But I used to be afraid of Amber Comber and Fitch because they used to have those shirtless you know like these shirtless hot guys standing outside and I felt that they could that they would know like I just thought like these guys are gonna know that I'm gay wait a minute I was afraid of standing outside the

store yeah oh you don't remember that like even the stores at the mall they'd have just these shirtless guys all you know they perfectly tan. They all look perfect. And they would just be standing there greeting you. And to me it was like... How did I miss this? It was like walking into a porn. So I was afraid that they were going to read gay on me. So I never... I'm not kidding. I don't think I have ever bought anything

from Abercrombie. I've been there many times, but I never saw the shirtless gay guys. I missed it. Good for you. What year was it that they did this? For a long time. They were doing this probably in the mid-early 2000s. Yeah, I probably didn't go to Abercrombie & Fitch until the mid-2000s. Maybe they were phasing it out.

You know what's really interesting? That started as a hunting and fishing supply company. Yeah. Like, boy, did they fucking make a turn. Yeah. Yeah, and then that guy, you know, the guy who runs it, who's got, he must did they fucking make a turn. Yeah. Yeah. And then that guy, you know, the guy who runs it, who's got, he must have body dysmorphia or something.

I don't know who he is. There's this guy. Pull it up, Jamie. What's his name? I don't know what his name is. He's the one who, he really instilled this idea that everyone there has to look perfect and look the same, sort of. And that's why they've had all these lawsuits with people that were either a little fat

that couldn't get jobs there, or I think there was a girl who wanted to wear a hijab or all that stuff And but if you look at this guy, we'll pull him up got so much fucking work done on his face Because he's just it goes to what you said before he's like expressing his own weaknesses and he's projecting them Sort of on to a generation of kids and he's also expressing his own Like confusion externally, whether he realizes... Yeah, I mean, look at that guy. Whoa.

Like, he's had some serious shit done. 61-year-old CEO, we don't need to say his name, says dude a lot. He'll say, what a cool... Oh, this is salon.com. First of all, fuck salon. Yeah, fuck salon.

Fuck you. I am down with that. You fucking creeps. Frauds. They're just aggressively shitty. And I don't... Who writes those fucking headlines, those headlines those tweets i had done follow them because i was like this is such epic bullshit and just such dishonest trash yeah like dave rubin why he's everything that's wrong with gay people today exactly i mean you would get those kind of articles and just twisting and distorting

your real positions to make social brownie points to appeal to the hardest of hardcore Aggressive social justice warrior lefties. Can we get everybody to hate everybody? Yeah Fucking split everybody down to just their color and their sex point where you can then control everybody because if anyone gets Out of that little box, there's something wrong with them yeah something wrong with you well this poor guy he's not hanging in there well like robert redford that motherfucker's hanging in there well yeah he's hanging in there well he's obviously an old dude but it doesn't look like a monster yeah like i was at um my kid has a gymnastics class and there's this poor unfortunate woman who goes to this gymnastic class who she looks like she's quite wealthy. She's

always dressed very well, but she's got what I call monster face. And monster face is when they shoot their face up with filler and then they do the lips and then they pull their face back so they have this sort of reptilian mouth where their mouth is way too big. And it's way too big because they're pulling this

fucking skin so the opening of their mouth doesn't match a normal person's face because it's it's bigger it stretches like this guy's chris christie stomach you keep pulling it it gets bigger i mean skin is flexible think how deranged really like the idea of that you know these people care about what they look like right so they want to look better so they go in that first time they get a little botox or they get Restylane or one of those fillers, whatever that is. But think how the course of that changes the way they think about everything to the point where that woman probably thinks she looks good. You know what I mean? That's an adventure in the psyche right there.

Yeah. I mean, it's the same as bodybuilders. It's the same as people with anorexia. Yeah. It's the same as the guys we were talking about before. You just keep doing it. No matter what you do, you take off your shirt, you look in the mirror and you go, this should be a little tighter over here. And the woman's looking at her. It's always the upper lip.

That's the one I see on these women. They get it fat. I have this poor lady that I know that had her lips done and every time she talks to you, she's got a scar Like inside of her mouth. Yeah, that's like it's her lip You know, it's like it there's a line so like it the lips never moved correctly Yeah, like Lisa Rina's at her name. Yeah, she had that thing removed right? I should she was the one that had like the crazy crazy crazy, crazy lips. And I'm pretty sure about a year ago she had like something taken out or some filler removed or something.

I get it though, man. I had hair transplants when I was in my 20s. They didn't take. Definitely didn't take. Not anymore. I had a joke about it. The joke was it's like taking really healthy people and moving them into a neighborhood where everybody's dying. It's like you try to repopulate like Chernobyl.

You thought you were gentrifying the front, but in the end you just killed more people. Well, you know what it is, man? You keep losing hair. So it worked at first. It's like, oh yeah, the parts that was falling out, I filled it in. We're good. But you're not good. It keeps fucking up.

So you did the thing where you actually had it cut out. See the back yeah they cut a strip out how long did you let it go before you gave up and just said well i had it done and then it's slow it was just slowly giving up and then there's also uh things you can do like you could take rogaine which kind of keeps it in but how funny is it when your name is rogan and you're going to buy Rogaine? That's ironic. Just for that reason alone, you probably shouldn't have been on it. I just dealt with it. I dealt with that.

But I'm like, if it works, I don't give a shit. And it did kind of work. And then Propecia, which works really well, but also kills your dick. So you got a lot of options there. I did. I was on Propecia for about six months, about maybe seven or eight years ago, and I couldn't get a boner. Yeah.

It's a boner killer. Yeah. I'd rather have a boner than hair. I agree. I can fully say that. But now that I've shaved my head, I actually like it way better. It's so easy. And you don't get kidnapped by people that are cutting your hair.

Because I used to get my hair cut by this lady who I love dearly. But sometimes I'd be in a rush, and she would hold me hostage with these fucking stories. Because she'd be holding the scissors. And then I told her, you're not going to fucking talk to me like that. And I'd be like, really interesting. Cut my fucking hair so I can run. Cut my hair so I can run away. So basically you shaved your head because you didn't want to listen to this bitch.

No, she's not a bitch. She's my friend. I love her. But her stories are terrible. But it's not even that. It's my friend. I love her, but her stories are terrible. But it's not even that. It's just something to not think about. It's like all of a sudden, when I shaved it, it was like instant freedom.

Like, oh, yeah. And I use the back of my head as a public service announcement. Like, if anybody's thinking about getting a hair transplant, I'm like, look at my head. See the scar? You don't want one of those. I mean, it's not the worst thing in the world. It's not cancer.

Let me get this straight. Can you swim? Because I always see in the commercials when they get the hair, suddenly they can swim again. It seems like they couldn't swim. They lost the ability to do the breaststroke. Well, the wig commercials are the same. In the wig commercials, they're always underwater.

Yeah. It's like fucking crazy. So you're telling me you can still swim? It's not as good. I'm a little sleeker through the water, so it's confusing. My timing is off. It all makes no sense because you see the Olympic guys,eker through the water so it's confusing my timing is off it all makes no sense because the you see the olympic guys they wear the caps so that it makes it seem like they're bald and they're swimming well and yet you watch those commercials and then they have

a head of hair and they're swimming well so it's very confusing well i think the idea is that if you get in the water like instantly all the work that you've done with hairspray to lock this fucking monster in place. Yeah. It all dissolves with the water and you leave behind an oil slick. But when you get in the water with one of those wacky wigs, the little hair club jammies, the idea is that you can, nobody can tell. Nobody can tell. Now, I know you have theories on things. Do you have a theory on hair loss?

Was it stress relatedrelated for you? No, it's just genetics. Purely genetic. It's 100% genetics. It's dihydrotestosterone. Your body produces a derivative of testosterone, DHT, causes your hair to fall out. I don't know why it exists in humans. It's a strange thing and why it exists in some and not others.

But they're, like, really close to fixing that, apparently, with just, just like some sort of a pill or a rub, but that'll probably cause cancer or do something. Yeah, that's going to go blind in one eye. You're going to have diarrhea and all that shit. Every pill we take causes 20 other things. You know, I really think that they need to start. They need to show us when they talk about the pill, whatever pill it is. You got restless leg syndrome.

You got. What is that? Your legs can't stop. How is that real? Bill Maher does a funny bit on that, like, you know, because we sit all day, it's your body, like, revolting against you. Like, get the fuck up.

Go do some shit. I wonder if, like, joggers get restless leg syndrome. Probably not, because they're actually moving. Yeah, I mean, that would be really interesting to study. Jamie, you're a runner. Do you ever get restless legs? You do? You got the restless leg? I've had it my whole Do you ever get restless legs you do you got the rest of my whole life? You get restless leg, but you've run a lot twice. I was moving my legs over here Okay, feel like they need to move. I don't know. Wow

I'm not sure So don't you think they should have to show like when they show you the pill and they and then everyone's running in a field It's all that bullshit marketing nonsense, right? But then they'll say it could cause suicidal thoughts. They should have to show someone going through suicidal thoughts or show somebody having diarrhea. Like they keep doing this, but the guy's running through a field having a hell of a... Show me what it's like. Those commercials.

Sudden death. Yeah. Show a guy walking down the boardwalk just dropping dead. You know what I mean? Like why are they allowed to do that? It's such mixed messaging. You don't understand what you're getting yourself into. Chantix, you're going to stop smoking.

You might drop dead. You might, you know, explosive diarrhea, whatever it is. Like, you better show me. Yeah, that's one thing if you're advertising a car, right? You know, if you've got like the newest Cadillac and it looks cool and you drive and you look cool driving like, man, I want to get one of those. That's sort of okay. But it's another thing if it's some crazy you meant you remember there was a drug that they were selling for a while They were advertising that was a supplement to your current antidepressant. Oh, that was like ambilla fly or something like yeah

Was that the one with the cloud the cartoon cloud that was following the guy? I think it was because if you have a cartoon cloud following've got some serious problems. But there's something fucked up about advertising for something that's a drug that can affect your mind and possibly cause suicidal thoughts. Because advertising is entirely designed to coax you into buying the product. Sure. And that's a big life to save. That's like, ask your doctor about it. You shouldn't be allowed to say that. You shouldn't be allowed to say it because then every, first off, everybody's on prescription drugs.

I'm not on any prescription drugs right now. Congratulations. I have been for about six months. Also around the Propecia time, I was on Lexapro or one of those like mild. That kills your dick too. You had a double whammy. Your dick was getting kicked and punched. Yeah.

Well, he's fully back. He's back and better than ever. Congratulations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Success. kicked and punched yeah well he's fully back he's back and better than ever yeah yeah yeah success um but i was on one of those and when i when i got off um i remember you know you're supposed to tell your psychiatrist or whatever because they'll wean you off it but i was like i didn't like the guy and i was like i'm just gonna get off this thing he didn't like the psychiatrist

so you're keeping shit from him i didn't like him his last name was ruben which is why i went to him and then i just didn't like him and i was like fuck this I'm not going to do it but anyway I just figured alright I take instead of taking one a day I'll just do one every other day and then one every three days something like that and it worked I weaned off it I kid you not I swear to god this is true I remember when you used to turn on an old computer

like an old desktop computer all the whirring and the buzzing and you'd hear the hard drive spinning and all that shit I could feel that in my brain for about two weeks when I got off it. Whoa. I felt my brain actually like resetting or something like literally a whirring. There was like, and then like little like sparks. Was this when you were thinking or any time?

I just remember I lived in New York City at the time. I remember very vividly one day I was walking down Amsterdam and I, maybe a week out and I felt my brain like just coming back on so that shit it does something to you yeah it does something and forget and the boner stuff and you know all that i had the reason i got off it actually was because one of my best friends childhood best friends was killed in a car accident and uh when i heard i had almost no reaction this is one of my best friends from four years old and i just was like i was sad but like i didn't have a sad reaction you know like i knew it was sad but my reaction wasn't sad and then i was like all right that's it that's a it's

a terrifying thing to remove the lows yeah all lows, like the lows are there to teach you. Yeah. I mean, you got to learn, you got to learn from failure. Failure is important. It's, and feeling bad is important. It really is because it makes you understand and appreciate the magnitude of feeling good. Like it draws you towards that as a better alternative. Sure.

And especially as an artist as someone that that speaks and is supposed to have a full set of emotions and be able to go on stage tell people what i think you know you know that's the argument with school shooters one of the things about school shooters is a massively disproportionate amount of them are on psych meds and the idea is that they can do that. And, you know, what came first? Is it the disease, the mental illness that causes them to be able to shoot somebody in the first place? Or is it the fact that they're on pills? Is it the fact that they're on pills because they're mentally ill?

Who the fuck knows? But people that I know that have been on various antidepressants, SSRIs or whatever, they tell you that things don't bother them. So if things don't bother them, like shooting people, like the lack of empathy, it seems to me, in my armchair psychology position, that there would just be a correlation there. Well, it's always why we have a real inability in America to talk about two things at once, that two things could be true at the same time. So like when you look at the shootings, immediately the people who are against guns will say it's about guns. And the people who are for guns will say it's about mental health. I'm pretty sure two things could be true at the same time.

Absolutely. And we have a mental health problem and we have too easy access to guns. You're a hunter. I'm pretty sure you're for the Second Amendment, right? Yes. Yeah. I believe in the Second Amendment. We should be able to arm ourselves.

But it is still too easy to get guns. You shouldn't be able to necessarily have a salt rifle to plow down 30 people at once, all that. But at the same time, yeah, a huge percentage of these people are on some sort of medication. That's not a coincidence. Not at all. No. And if they didn't have something wrong with them, no matter how many guns you had access to, you're a relatively sane guy. No matter how many guns you have, you're not going to shoot a school, right?

Yeah. So that says, yeah, there's some mental health component to this. Well, I think it should be really difficult to get a car, too. I mean, I think it should be difficult to get a gun. I mean, in SOAS, they should do some sort of background check. They should evaluate whether or not you have any competency whatsoever. How much have you learned about shooting a gun? And that's not the case right now.

Yeah. I mean, the other problem is there's so many guns out there that the people that are doing this shit, like this last guy in Oregon, I think he didn't get the gun. It was his mom that got the gun, I think. So it's like you can get a gun, even if you shouldn't be able to get a gun. Yeah, that is an issue, but we should make it at least more difficult. And the mental health aspect of it is a huge problem. And to say that it's not, that it's only a gun issue is a blind thing that people do. I think you're right. I think there's a bunch of different issues at stake here. And I think that's the case with a lot of different things.

That's one of the problems that I have with the idea of a left and a right. I think I have a lot of left ideas, almost all of them. And then I'll have a few right ideas. I'm on sort of both sides with a lot of shit. Yeah, well, I definitely want to get into that with you because that's become like my home now. This is really the split on the left between what I'm calling the regressives and people that I think really stand for liberal principles. That's all on the left. But yeah, I have some, you know, I have a lot, look, comedians in general, I think have hugely

strong libertarian leanings because you want to be, I'm a firm believer that the government should have very little to do with our lives. Make sure I don't get shot, which they're not that great at that. You know, take care of the economy, keep us safe. Like that pretty much is what I think the government's role should be. That's it. That's about it. You know, make sure we have a good education system. The road should be okay. You're like pretty limited stuff. And I think usually for some reason, comedians do fall on that scale. know Chris Rock is there Bill Maher there's a zillion comedians on that side of it but I've seen a massive split in the left right now and this goes to all the the social justice warrior shit and everyone's a racist and a homophobe

and it's fucking exhausting and it's it's well look you've had Sam Harris on a bunch of times yeah look what these people have done to Sam Harris. It's insane. They're just using him as a target. That's what I believe. I believe that instead of looking at his actual positions and being objective and saying, does he have a point? What is his point? Let's debate the point. Let's let's debate the merits of the point.

Instead, he's a guy that you can point to and say, well, he has a strong position about Islam. So he is Islamophobic. He is therefore racist. And he should be attacked and fuck that piece of shit. And I mean, I've seen the same written about Christopher Hitchens. You know, I saw some people when he died that were writing good riddance. And I made fun of this one social justice war because he was saying good riddance to Hitchens. But then when Osama bin Laden died, he was like, i am not going to celebrate the death of any human being i'm like well this is fucking hilarious this is yeah i know what you're doing

you're not thinking you're not thinking you're you're writing things and this is part of the problem with social media and i think one of the things that we're finding with this whole social justice warrior issue is that it's not necessarily just opinions. It's opinions that are being expressed in a way where they know people are going to hear it. They know people are going to see their writing. And so that knowledge that someone's going to see what you're writing and react to it, either positive or negative, affects your choices. It's like reality TV.

And what they're doing is like when you see people act fake on reality TV because you know that they know the cameras are on them that's what you're doing when you make a retarded social justice warrior tweet you're a hundred percent right so I know someone I can't give their name who right now is pretty big in their reality space on a reality show right this second know them very well and he says to me all the time like that's what he's doing all He's doing is ramping it up to stay on the show to keep the whole thing go of course

And that's what these people are doing so Sam how many times has he been here at least twice right now? Four or five four or five times, so you've sat with this guy for hours 20 hours with this guy at least do you think he's racist in any way whatsoever? No, but you know what he is? He's fearless. Yes. And I'm not saying he doesn't have fear of normal consequences of, you know, whatever, danger. It's not that. It's just that if he has a principle, he'll express it.

And I've disagreed with him about certain points. Of course. But his principles and his opinions are, he will truly express them. And in unpopular subjects, like when you're talking about Islam or you're talking about religion in general, I mean, he takes a tremendous amount of heat about that. But he only gets it for Islam though, right? Because that's the truth of it. Like this is a guy who wrote letter to a Christian nation. Guess what it was about? Christianity. Nobody called him a Christian-a-phobe, right? So when Bill Maher, so that night that the whole thing, all hell broke loose with Affleck.

Yeah. On real time. Or heaven. Heaven broke loose. Right, exactly. Whatever you want to call it. Some imaginary bullshit. That night, and I know we've both talked about this a ton, but what happened was Affleck

immediately went to the social justice warrior. I'm holier than thou. I'm going to protect the downtrodden thing. Right. And it was nonsense and bullshit. Sam sat there. Again, you can disagree with the premises of what he says. You can disagree with his feelings on profiling or nuclear first strike.

But he'll debate all of those. I sat with him for an hour and a half and he would have done three hours, but our crew guys had to leave. I mean, this is a guy who will stake out these positions and unpopular positions and put them out there and they just want to shout him down. And what the, what the real thing though, is it's the chilling effect on that is that what it's not about shutting down Sam. If Sam disappears tomorrow, I think it would be really bad for our discourse as a country and I think this is a guy saying important shit but ultimately guess what they're gonna come for Joe Rogan they're gonna come for

Dave Rubin and they're gonna come for all the other people that are tweeting about this and what they're really doing is just trying to take the moral high ground they're trying to take a position of being like first of all if Ben a half lick had a real nuanced and objective position He certainly didn't express it on that show. You mean you get so racist. It's so racist. Yeah. He's a fucking idiot Yeah, really is a fucking idiot. You know, I don't know that I can go see that Batman movie No, because he has turned me I love superhero movies love him well that the fact that he was willing to take that position on a show like that and argue it like that without Without I mean first of all,, I like Bill Maher.

I think he's a very funny comic. That show sucks. This is why the show sucks. Really, I like it a lot. This is why it sucks. It doesn't suck because it's a sucky show. It sucks because all these subjects are massively important and have a bunch of people shouting over each other. Like here, you and I have very strong opinions and we want to express ourselves.

And there's only two of us, luckily. Because if there was five of us in the room right now and we're all talking, it would be really hard to fucking get your points across. Because you've got to kind of jump in. And this is what happens when you get a guy like Sam Harris and a guy like Ben Affleck. And Ben Affleck, what you're saying is so racist. It's so racist. Instead of having an hour to go, okay Well, why don't you tell me why it's racist and give me your thoughts in the Middle East and tell me what you would do about you know X amount of people who are so

Entangled in their ideology that they want death upon people. They wish death upon people who leave the religion Yeah, tell me what you do about that Tell me what you do about people that think that it's wrong to have women go to school. Tell me what you would do about, we're talking about ideologies. You can call it Islam. You can call it the Moonies. You can call it Scientology. You can call it whatever the fuck you want.

But what it really is, is a rigid set of ideologies. These are ideologies that you are forced to subscribe to a predetermined pattern of behavior and thinking. And if you are not in that predetermined pattern of behavior and thinking, they wish death upon you. And they think that they should be able to stone you if you're a homosexual. They should be able to stone you if you're an adulterer. There's a horrible video online of this poor woman

whose father throws the first rock. Oh, I've seen it. Have you first rock. Oh, I've seen it. Have you seen that? Yeah, I've seen it. And she wants to touch him before he kills her and he won't touch her hand and then he hits her with the rock. But think about the absurdity. So there's so much here, right?

So think about the absurdity of this, that the hatred for these people, the hatred for Sam, for Bill Maher. So whether you like Bill Maher or not, I like the show. I do like Bill Maher. And when I say it sucks, what I mean is those formats. All those talk show formats suck. Those split screen Bill O'Reilly things where Bill talks and three experts shout, we'll be right back. It's not enough time.

Yeah. Look, Bill Maher loves Bernie Sanders. Obviously, he had him on the show last week. He only had six minutes with him. That's crazy. Imagine what me or you would do with that guy if he was here right now. We could literally talk all day. And he should. And he should.

And Bill should have a show like that. Sure. Where it's just Bill sitting down with these people and not being forced into that fucking soundbite-y type of conversation. Because that's what they're doing. Well, listen, I love Bill, but I'll do that show. How about that? There you go. So thank you for that.

Bill's got his own archaic yeah let him let him that's fine that i just think that format is like everybody thinks that everybody needs to be like fast fast fast fast it's not the case well look i think both of us are proof that it's not the case i think for a long time everything was getting smaller and smaller the internet burst this thing twitter came out we're going to talk in 140 characters vine came out six seconds so everything kept kept getting smaller, smaller, smaller. But what I'm absolutely seeing now, we've only been doing my show in its current incarnation for two months. Sam was my first guest. This was the first week in September. And we started doing long form stuff again, exactly what you're doing here. And what I've seen is the more, the longer we go,

the more we extrapolate ideas, talk about stuff, don't scream at each other. I'm bringing on people on the right and on the left. And the more that we do this, the more people want. So I think there's a bounce back now from that short thing, you know, where everybody on television, they start, you know, and it's partly like a show that I love on ESPN, part of the interruption, and they would have the countdown going, you know, and everything had to be quick, quick, quick, quick, quick. But I think people are actually ready for this. And I think clearly, and I don't think it, I mean, that's why this is working for you. You know what I mean? People want to actually hear a couple of thoughts. Let's hear two things that don't necessarily line up and let's hear people that,

listen, I hope that plenty of people that will be listening to this will disagree with me, will disagree with you. And at the end we'll go'll go well it's not because they're racist but they got some ideas that let's challenge those ideas well i think the entertainment aspect of those shows where there's like five people in a room and and then also you have a fucking audience that cheers when they agree yeah and some and some of them are just so lefty so super you know like fucking applauding at every point. But Bill's good because he shuts up his own audience. He does.

I've literally seen him do stand-up where he's yelled at the audience for giving him applause breaks. I mean, how many times have you ever seen that in a comedy show? That's pretty good. Yeah. And during his show, he does do that when people chime in. But I just think that the entertainment aspect of expressing yourself almost sometimes takes precedent over the concepts and the ideas themselves, because it's all in how you deliver it and how forcefully you can get it past the other people that are trying to say contrary points. So the Ben Affleck thing is the perfect example of that, because by yelling out gross and racist

within a minute, right? So think about it. It's pretty much the worst thing you can say about somebody, right? To call them racist. That's pretty, you know, beyond you're a child molester or something. It's pretty much the worst thing you can say. Think about if you were having an argument with somebody about this stuff. Let's say you were privately arguing with someone about Islam and religion and blah, blah, blah. It would take a while for you to call them racist, right? Like you wouldn't.

You would have to go deep into it. You'd have to go pretty deep. By the time that you personally got there, to that place where you were to say, you're racist. I don't think I would even... I would probably say that idea is racist before I would even say you're racist, because

I gotta think that, like, some people will say, well, I have black friends. Well, what do you like about black people? You know, like, you go into that, and at the end of it, well, they smell different. I like to be around people that are dumber than me. OK, you're a fucking racist. Now you're a racist. Yeah.

You know what I mean? But that illustrates your point perfectly, that the problem with these shows and the problem with this discussion and problem with social justice, it's all like a perfect storm of craziness. storm of craziness because the next day after that show all the online sites mediate everybody the headlines were all Ben Affleck calls Bill Maher and Sam Harris racist so suddenly the onus was on them to prove that they're not racist exactly that is not only is that bonkers but I asked Sam about this and he he said something that I thought was fascinating he was on that show to discuss his book called Waking Up, which is a spiritual guide to, it's a guide to spirituality without religion. So he's talking

about meditation. He's talking about inner peace. I've read the book, you know, like some pretty lofty stuff. He said from that point forward, the next six months of my life, we're on a book tour about inner peace, but all I had to do is defend myself that I'm not a racist. I mean, really, peace but all I had to do is defend myself that I'm not a racist I mean really think how cosmically warped that is well and it came from I believe Ben Affleck wanting to state a position that he felt would be very popular and would resonate it would get him social brownie points yeah I really believe that because it's what he did what he said the way he expressed himself is not nuanced it's not objective it's not complex and well thought out, and it's a very, very deep and important subject, a massively important subject. Because what we're talking about in 2015, when you're talking about any ancient religion,

you're talking about clinging to these ideas that were formed and ingrained in these communities well before science, well before people had a deep understanding of human psychology, of human nature, of the power of suggestion and culture, and well before we understood the way the world actually works as far as nature, as far as physics, as far as just the formation of the universe. All this information is not applicable to most of the religions in the world today. Not only are you right, but that's even what Sam wrote in End of Faith. And Batman tripped him up.

And fucking Batman. Before the movie even came out. The new Batman. Like, think how insane that is. If you really step back and dissect what you just said there, that if you took what the average person thought of the world and of science and of medicine and everything that we know of and food and everything in 1840, by that standard now in 2015, that person would look pretty damn dumb.

Yet for some reason, these books that were written, you know, thousands of years ago, whatever it is, somehow those have some validity that we should still respect. We shouldn't respect these books. They're ideas. They're ideas that time has long since let go of. So by respecting them, we're actually doing something crazy. If we want to if we really want to be free, if we want to be free thinkers and and people that I don't give a fuck about anyone's race or religion or sex or

sexuality. I judge people on what they say and what they think and what the social justice warriors are doing. They're trying to win this argument by shutting everybody down. Yes. And they're doing it. I think there is a degree of them doing it for lofty reasons. I think Ben Affleck thinks in his lofty, rich Hollywood whatever that he's helping the downtrodden. I don't think he does. Really? No.

I'm entirely cynical. You know why? Because I know too many actors. And I know what they are. Here's the thing about actors. And this is not all actors obviously just like you know not all comics or heroin addicts and drug addicts whatever i think that what it is to be an actor is to pretend to be something else right that's that's what it is and it's also you have to get past the audition process and the audition process is essentially saying all the right things.

So, Dave, where are you from? Where'd you grow up? And you have to, like, who are you voting for? There's that shit. There's a reason why Hollywood leans almost entirely left. Right. Do you think they really do? Because I think a lot of them are secretly voting Republican. Well, there's certain few. They're voting on taxes, right? You've got your Charleston Hestons

and your fucking, you know, there's a few John Voights out there. And the guy from, what was it? We'll be back in two and two. Oh, Chuck Woolery. Chuck Woolery. He's like hardcore. I follow him on Twitter just to laugh at all the fucking Republican shit that he writes.

Yeah. There's always going to be a few Hollywood conservatives. Obviously, Chuck Woolery is not in any big movies or anything like that. But there is always going to be a few conservatives in Hollywood. not in any big movies or anything like that, but there is always going to be a few conservatives in Hollywood, but the casting people, the producers, the executives, overwhelmingly left-leaning.

And to be in that club, you have to agree with them. And there's a problem with that whole audition process when it comes to actors. You can't work unless someone approves you, unless someone takes you in and accepts you and chooses you dave you're the right guy for the part yes yeah now you're yeah and you can't say anything controversial that will fuck that up and then you're essentially like you're on a dating program for the world not not dating like you're trying to get laid but like you're trying to get the world to love you yeah so when a guy like ben affleck who's been doing this his whole life

gets on that show and someone says something that then he thinks, I can get in here and make some fucking points. I can get some social brownie points up on the board. I think that's racist. You're racist and this is gross. He's just like a guy at an audition. He's full of shit. You know what, Rogan? I'm going to prove to you right now that I don't just say shit, but I believe it because you've changed my mind. That argument was good enough that you've changed

my mind, that I do agree that he wasn't doing it out of some lofty thing, that it's purely that. There might be a you know, maybe we can split hairs a little bit and it's 80-20 or whatever, but I think that actually does make more sense. And it also explains why it happened within a minute because he was ready for it to happen before

the segment even started. I think there are also sociopaths that get involved in philanthropic ventures to make themselves look good. Oh sure I absolutely 100% believe that some people do some philanthropic shit so that it makes them look better and And this is this is like sort of to mask the the psychosis that Bubbles below the surface of their skin that they're trying to hide from people like you can't go after me i work with the firefighters you know i'm i'm i'm i support the first sponsors you responders you know i'm down with the firefighters you can't call me a plagiarist yeah you can't like like sandusky like what he's doing he's doing working with little kids helping

all these little kids well surely that guy's not fucking them yeah Yeah. How could he do that? He loves the children. I mean, that is the kind of shit that happens with a lot of evil people. So this is interesting. So for comics, then it really is particularly bizarre because there's the approval thing, right? And comics want approval just the same way actors do. But comics are also the good ones. And unfortunately, there's not many of us left that you're supposed to stake out controversial positions.

Yeah. So that goes against the sort of mass approval thing. But it doesn't in comedy. But right now, is counterculture cool right now? Is there any comic? There's a couple people, I guess, that are doing some counterculture stuff. Okay, well define counterculture. Well, counterculture that you'd be really against the government, you'd be against the administration, you know, you'd be fighting more for some of the things that I think we're doing with the social justice, fighting for free speech relentlessly, fighting against bad ideas.

So you could be fighting against the ideas of Islam without being racist or in a race, but without even being without being bigoted towards Muslim people like right now, I think partially because of Obama, it's cool to like the president. You know what I mean? Just by his by he's black. He's cool. I'd love to play basketball with him. I'm sure he'd be fun to have a drink with. So it's cool to like the power right now.

So in a weird way, I think if we have a Republican president next time, comedy is going to get a lot better real quick because it's gonna be a lot Easier to attack, but is it cool to like him if you look at the facts Is it cool to like them when you look at the ways attacked whistleblowers? No, but nobody's talking about that That's my point people are there's plenty people are they are in podcasts. Yeah. Yeah, you know I know a lot of really smart people that are attacking it. All right. Well, that's hard to me. Guys like Duncan Trussell, Kurt Metzger. I know a lot of very smart comics that just think it's fucking gross that you've got a

guy that's killed more innocent people with drones or been responsible for being the lead, the commander in chief of the greatest army the world has ever known that has caused thousands of people to die innocently through drone strikes. They're shooting at cell phones. They're shooting missiles at where a cell phone is. And that's what metadata is. Look, we just blew up that hospital. Yes.

I mean, we blew up that hospital. And, you know, we could get into a whole thing about the Middle East. But, like, there's terrible shit. The whistleblower thing, I think, is a good spot. Yeah. Did you hear Edward Snowden on Neil deGrasse Tyson's show? No, I didn't. You should listen to it.

It's amazing. Okay. It's great, but please go on. Yeah. I mean, look, that's what Obama's doing right now. That's what he's doing. There's a reason that Obama, you know, a lot of people on the left, the progressives when Obama got in immediately were like, you know, he has to try, you know, Cheney for war crimes

and blah, blah, blah. And there's a reason why he didn't. That wasn't just about power. It was also because he's killing a lot of people with drones right now. And 20 years from now, he doesn't want that president, President Willow Smith or whoever it's going to be, to come in and be like- Willow Smith? Is that like Jada Pinkett Smith? That's the sister.

Isn't that the sister? Is she going to win? Probably. I guess Jaden probably would be president first or I don't know. But whoever it's going to be it's going to be one of them I might vote for Will how about that?

you'd vote for Will? I might vote for Will Smith is he running? I don't know but he's a smart motherfucker and I like when I listen to him talk I think he's a balanced and intelligent guy that expresses himself very well

he's extremely well read but is he a Scientologist? I don't think he's a Scientologist, but I think he's dabbled. So is Jerry Seinfeld. Hey, look, I bought Dianetics. I bought it online. Not even online. I got it from one of those late night infomercials in 1994 when I first moved to Hollywood.

Oh, I remember those commercials. We're on all the time in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, I'm in the middle of Lawrence Wright's Going Clear. Holy, I can't read it for too long, man. I go to other books because I read it for like a few chapters and I go, fuck this. Because it's so crazy. Well, did you watch the thing on HBO?

Yes, I started the book first. Then I watched the thing on HBO. And then I keep going back to the book, but I haven't finished it. It's got like probably halfway in. But I can't. You know what's weird about Kindles? You don't see I'm probably halfway in, but I, I, I can't, you know, it's weird about Kindles. You don't see that you're halfway in, but you see numbers. Like I like, I like a thickness thing where like I'm down to the bottom. I got like a very thin remainder. But even the numbers that doesn't mean anything to me. Those numbers at the bottom that show, you know, you're on page

100 or 500 pages. Hmm. That's not, it's not registering. How do you, how do you decide as someone in this space, how much information to put in your brain? Cause that's one of the things that I do.

Huge problem. Yeah. I struggle with this all the time because I love politics. And I told you, I've been going to the spin rooms. We can talk about some politics stuff later. Um, and I love all that stuff and I love current events and I love

Middle East politics and I love talking about religion all of this shit like i love all of it that's that's what i'm here for right on this earth that's what i'm here for but i do find sometimes i can't there's just too much coming into my brain yeah and then when you have my you know sitting on the couch and i'm watching seinfeld which i should be should be the time that i can shut my brain down right an episode that I've seen 150 times before that I know every line coming out and I have my iPad and I have my iPhone and my laptop's there and I'm doing this. And it's like, it's like minority report from hell, you know? And I really struggle with that. Like shutting it down sometimes and you know, I'm not even just talking about the devices but just actually the stuff that you're putting in your brain yeah all the time and

you got to know your shit you know it's tough well fortunately I don't necessarily really have to know my shit because no but you know your shit but I all I have to do is say I'm not sure about that and I'm okay because I'm a comedian like don't, yeah. But you know what I mean? Like, like especially in these sort of conversations, like you and I, we exchanged some emails about some stuff that'd be cool to talk about, but we don't have a format. Obviously we're all over the place.

We're gay discos and Ben Affleck's a douche and, you know, Bill Maher's formats are antiquated. And you know, there's, you can only have so much information in your head and this is part of the problem that i have with this going clear book why i keep going to it and then going to other shit it's because i feel like why am i fucking reading so much about this sociopath

fucking nightmare crazy cult leader dude that that that has formed this insane religion because i can't part of me can't put it down part of me I started reading about all the crazy shit that he did and how nutty this guy really was and how many people followed his wacky ideas I just like it becomes fascinating could be talking about Scientology or any religion I could yeah some wacky guy with some crazy ideas that thought somebody was talking to him next thing you know Yeah, there's and a lot of cash

Well, there's dirt, you know Obviously there's different ones and some of them their followers like like Mormons are like notoriously nice people Mm-hmm I could so that was one of the weirdest religions because they're so nice But then like if you go to Islam Muhammad was a warlord Yeah Like, if you go to Islam, Muhammad was a warlord. Yeah. And you've got a very different type of religion when, first of all, you're dealing with the environment that these people live in is extremely hostile. As far as, like, the temperature is extremely hot. The battle for natural resources is very difficult.

And you're also dealing with the cradle of civilization. And I have this bit about Islam that never really came to fruition. Not even Islam, but the Middle East, rather. The Middle East is essentially like they're the townies of the world. Because that's where culture was created. And everybody, look, human beings were created in Africa. That's where the first human beings came from. By however method.

Whether you believe in evolution. There's an alien that dropped some shit i saw prometheus yeah fucking terrible i watched it the other day i wanted it to be good i wanted it to be good i want i watched the beginning again you know with the with the guy and he comes down and he splits the thing and and i was like what is what what happened here yeah the idea is that he seeded the world with his dna and then he knew somehow another would develop into human beings but why did charlize theron not move a little to the left when the thing was falling remember the end oh yeah there's the giant ship and it's falling and all she has to do she's running straight and the ship's falling this way and it's slow real slow

all she'd do is go a little panic attack she just freaked she freaked out all right panicked i don't know this we could get into that all day she made up for it in mad max yeah that was awesome um what was my point what the fuck we're going i took you somewhere there prometheus beginning of the world mesopotamia you know came from this one i mean the the the most ancient version of a human being like i think they think that we're in this current form. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they're thinking it's like 250,000 plus years, right? So whatever that was, at one point in time, they left Africa and a lot of them settled in the Middle East. Egypt, of course, is a part of Africa, but it is in the Middle East officially.

And they spread out all throughout the country. But the oldest what we know today as far as we know the oldest written language the oldest uh uh agriculture the oldest government structure was sumer and that's where iraq is you know you're dealing with like six thousand plus years ago that's that's iraq i mean that is the that's that's the cradle of civilization it's a fucking shithole a crazy wacky fucked up civil war the muslims are fighting the muslims the shia's and the sunnis are blowing each other up on roadside bombs and it's it's chaos it's chaos and when you get to these parts of the world that are amongst the most ancient cultures you have what i call the echoes of savages it's like the the culture has lasted for so long and the reverberations of these ancient ideas that have been long disproven and long they're still there they're they're permeated look that's why the middle east especially we

could also talk about israel palestine if you want all of it is such a clusterfuck because so you could take someone like sam who will talk about it from the religious part. Right. And he'll mostly blame religion. And then you can take a lot of my friends on the left and they say it's all geopolitics and they usually blame the United States. The truth is, and as I said before, we have to have two thoughts at once. And I know it's very hard for people to be able to do that. It's both. It is both in the most extreme ways. Look, first off,

Iraq and Syria right now are not even countries. By any estimation of what a functioning country is that would partake in the world thing. Right. Nor is Libya. Libya is not. And look, we did. So think about Libya for a second. Obama did that. No congressional authorization. Right. Everyone goes crazy on Bush about Iraq. Now, obviously, in retrospect, the Iraq war is pretty bad and you can clearly make a line to it led to ISIS, which then has now destabilized the whole thing. But he at least had congressional authorization. Now, maybe he lied or we know now know that they were planting evidence and all that. But Obama went into Libya right when he became president with no congressional authorization. I have no idea what's going on in Libya right now. Is it a country? Have you seen Bourdain's show on it? The CNN show? I don't think.

Has there been a Libya one? Yeah. I was just watching it last night about Ethiopia. Yeah. That show's amazing. Yeah. He's amazing. But it was shit when Gaddafi was running it, obviously.

It was a horrible, horrible place, And he was a terrible, evil dictator. But when you remove a dictator, you create a vacuum. And that vacuum gets sucked up by people that want to try to claim power. Yeah. Well, this is this is the strange thing about the neocons, right? So neocons believe that we should use our American power to either nation build, or, you know, look, I know everyone on the left will say, well, they're doing it because we want their natural resources. Like, again, it's one of these things that there's a zillion reasons why everyone wants some piece of that part of the world. But people will say, well, Iraq was better off with Saddam.

He was doing horrible things to his people. He was using mustard gas on the Kurds, right? I think it was the Kurds. He was using mustard gas on the on the Kurds, right? I think it was the Kurds So we've we've helped we've backed leaders Mubarak in Egypt was our guy We backed him then they overthrew him then we backed the Muslim Brotherhood then they overthrew them now We're backing another Mubarak guy like we just our policies are all crazy It's all military industrial complex and it's just this endless cycle of craziness over there I mean you can't

get any crazier than having a guy like dick cheney as the vice president who's the ceo of halberd and a company that rebuilds places that we blow up it sounds like a schwarzenegger movie right like he's the bad guy in a schwarzenegger movie from the 80s or the bad guy in rambo i mean it's really yeah it's almost so obvious and that's why we can't believe it yeah you know what i mean because they're showing it to us. Exactly. Here's what it is, guys. No big deal.

Halliburton, by the way, they're doing a lot of shit in Iraq right now. You think it's a coincidence? Not only that, they got no bid contracts. They didn't have to bid. They didn't have to bid. They didn't have other people competing. What do we do? What do we do?

What do we do? We hope that information and the distribution of information that's available today that was barely available when Bush was in office. Yeah. And we hope that the spread of that and the understanding of that will balance out all this shit. And I'm hoping that that's the case with social justice warriors. I'm hoping that's the case with these right-wing fucking fanatics that want to blow up and bomb and invade everything that doesn't believe in Jesus. I'm hoping that all that stuff gets balanced out because I think the amount of change that we've experienced in our lifetime is unprecedented. Cultural change, informational change has been the big one. The invention of the internet, I fully believe that when we go back

and historians look at this point in time, they see it as an explosion of change, like a veritable explosion of ideas and of the ability to express themselves. And your show represents that. Your podcast represents that. You don't have anybody telling you what to do. You can talk about whatever you want. There's no studio execs to come in and go, stop, Dave, we got to get off this subject. Dave, you can't talk about Ben Affleck. We're doing a film with Ben. One of our subsidiaries is very upset with this and that and that. You know, the affiliates are calling in right now. They want to cancel our program.

We're going to have to figure out a way to do this better. You said some bad things about Abilify. And Abilify is one of our new sponsors. And you should ask your doctor about it because maybe you need it. Yeah, and then my cloud gets even bigger. It's hanging over me all the time. It's really, it's work. But yeah, I'm with you.

But do you think we've gotten to a breaking point with that? Because I think one of the reasons that I wanted to do this with you and I've been harassing you to come on my show forever is because I see the things that we're talking about and our audiences are so interlaced, right? And I really, really believe it has a lot to do with the Sam thing,

but I think there's been, we're close to the tipping point of defeating the social justice warriors. I really think they're eating themselves. Right. Well, because that, because identity politics ultimately has to eat itself. That's, that's the fatal flaw so that they'll take someone like Bernie Sanders who stands for every fucking progressive principle known to man. He doesn't want money in politics. He's everything that the left wants. And what happens? He has Black Lives Matter people grabbing the mic away from him a month ago, screaming he doesn't care enough about black lives when when there's no

reason to believe that. But if but if you parse everyone down to their one issue. So if you say that these people are only going to care about Black Lives Matter and these people are only going to care about abortion and these people are only going to care about Islam or whatever it is, you have ultimately you're you're just a group of people who ultimately have interests that have nothing to do with each other and you're going to destroy each other. And that's why I think the reaction to this is so good and so powerful. And I think it's real. It's happening right now. I could feel it. Well, when that Black Lives Matter thing happened, those girls were screaming and he was saying we're going to give them the microphone afterwards. Like, what? That is not how you get to express yourself.

That's not how you do it. You don't interrupt and decide that your message is more important than their message. Yeah. And of course, at the same time. And in their format. Yeah. In their place. With their microphone.

At the same time, what did they probably end up doing? I don't have any empirical evidence on this, but they probably ended up strengthening the people that don't like them. You see what this what this is doing, you know, so there's so much to it. But that's why I really I think the social justice warrior thing and it has a lot the same thing in the way that they treated him. I'm talking about, you know, Glenn Greenwald and Reza and my former boss, Cenk, who I know you've had on here. The way these people treated him in this dishonest attack on ideas that it came from the left. We're supposed to debate ideas, right? We're on the left. So what does liberalism stand for? We believe in the debate of ideas. You could say the people on the right. Well, they're more dogmatic. They're more religious. They don't want to debate ideas. right, well, they're more dogmatic. They're more religious. They don't want to debate ideas. So I can't deal with those people. The right went off the deep end a long time ago. What I have to care

about as someone that's on the left and that believes in liberal principles and doesn't want to see gays thrown off the roof in Syria and all that shit, it doesn't mean I want to invade Syria. It doesn't mean I want a nation built, but I should be able to talk about that without being called a racist or whatever it is. And I think we've hit something here. I think one of the things that we've hit is there are people that are balanced and that are socially aware and that are fun and interesting to talk to. And then there's social retards and social retards that form on the left. They tend to be unbelievably aggressive and douchey about really good ideas. Like whether it's Black Lives Matter or whether it's supporting gay rights or whether it's

transgender rights or any of the ideas that I'm sure you and I could both agree with. What they're doing and the way they're doing it is they found something that gives them the green light to be an asshole. And one of the things they're doing in being an asshole is they're making up for being picked on. They're making up for being picked on they're making up for being rejected They're making up for the abuse that they've suffered at other people's hands that have caused them to have this unbalanced Social persona and that's what it's all about. It's about social retards with really good points

Yeah, I mean, yeah, you're on it. So you could use the gay rights thing as a great example of that So, you know, look we didn't have gay marriage marriage until officially it was June 26 happened to be my birthday. Congratulations. Thank you. On my birthday, the Supreme Court said, you know, I was engaged already at the time, but I kind of like the idea of getting gay married when it wasn't fully legal, because then I thought I'd be like running from the law or something like that had some sort of bad. You're going to be a rebel. Yeah, I was going to be like hunting a guy with one arm, you know, who killed my wife. None of it made sense, but I had this idea of something in my head.

But anyway, if you take that movement, look, it happened pretty damn quick. I know gay people have wanted rights for a long time, but if you take the last five years, the way this thing has evolved and now it's cool. Look, you're a straight white man. Pretty much the worst thing there is, right? I mean, that's- That's what I hear. Yeah, you're

just awful even sitting here with a terrible person it's been you know very grating for me but uh if you look at the gay rights thing the left was all about it and i and they they love gays they love gays they love gays but at the end of the day now gays have equal rights now i know there's still job issues and there's some stuff but we got that fucking lady in kentucky that yeah oh we can you know well we can get davis right so there's still all kinds of shit i don't mean i don't mean to say that everything's perfect there's resistance but the point is the supreme court the law of the land now is equal in terms of marriage yes but what i realized sort of halfway through that was it's not that the left really cares about gays as much as sort of this idea sort of of what you're talking about. Because

at the end of the day, now that gay people have equality, well, guess what? Suddenly gay people might start voting Republican because they might want to vote on taxes. They might, you know, so the identity politics thing is only good for a little while. And then once everyone's equal, it's just a way of pitting people against each other. Yeah. Then you really just become a fat person with pink hair. Yeah. That's all you are.

You're not this amazing person with this moral high ground that stands above and gets to proclaim how they've been fighting for rights and screaming and yelling and crying. You're screaming and yelling and crying because you're socially retarded. Why are these people, by the way, why are they all anonymous? If they're so lofty in their- There's plenty of anonymous. No, no, no. I mean, I know there's public ones, but I'm not talking about them. But I mean, the people that'll be yelling at me over some social justice shit. But they're on the right as well, though. Oh, yeah. But that's what I mean. I'm not defending. I think people sort of think that

somehow I'm defending the right. There is nothing I agree with these people on. You know what I mean? I have to clean my house and my house is on the left. So I want the left to be better. I fully believe now that the regressives, which is what the progressives have become because their ideas are now regressive, not progressive, that they are the Tea Party of the left. And if the Republicans, if the average conservative,

whether you agree with them or not, five years ago when the Tea Party was gaining strength and we're not going to negotiate with anyone and government shutdowns and all that, if the average conservative had said, these are our principles, whether you agree or not, we believe in limited government, all that stuff, low taxes, whatever, strong defense. If they would have said that, they might have been able to reel the Tea Party in a little bit, but instead they just went to their worst, the worst piece of them. And I see it happening with us on the left. And that's why I'm so against the regressive left.

We got to bring them back because otherwise we're going to have the regressive left and we're going to have the tea party. And guess what? The gig is up. Yeah, I agree. But I think that is what you find in the universe. You find this extremely broad range you find a spectrum and in that spectrum you have completely psychotic on one side and completely psychotic so it's that horseshoe thing right and then at the end they're the same yeah and then

this it really is i mean and then there's there's a balance and i think that a lot of i i think a lot of us given different circumstances could be swayed to have different points of view and different ideas and i'm also pulled not in the sense like logically but i find myself compelled when i see people that are really religious when i listen to like some muslim guy that's speaking with great confidence about the power of islam the truth of islam i find myself compelled i don't believe it i don't i don't support it as an ideology guy that's speaking with great confidence about the power of Islam and the truth of Islam. I find myself compelled. I don't believe it.

I don't support it as an ideology, but I'm fascinating by the natural human compulsion to want to join that. The natural human, like there's something about someone who is unbelievably confident in what they're doing is the right thing and is, is proclaiming it publicly and loudly through a microphone that makes you go, wow, maybe he's right. Islam is the truth. Kind of like Hitler.

Kind of like Hitler. Exactly like Hitler. Yeah. But that's, but that's why we, it's a human nature thing. It is human nature. And look,

if, if that's why they attract all these people there, there's no doubt that that's what's going on here. And what we have to do, listen, I don't know what's going on in the universe in the scheme of, I have no freaking idea, but that doesn't, that's fertile ground for someone having to make that leap of faith

and being like, I don't have any idea. So yeah, just, it's the 10, I'm going to follow the 10 commandments. I mean, I'm pretty much, I don't believe in religion in any way whatsoever, but I get, if we were to have the 10 commandments here, I'm probably sure I'm pretty to follow the Ten Commandments. I mean, I'm pretty much, I don't believe in religion in any way whatsoever. But I get, if we were to have the Ten Commandments here, I'm probably sure I'm pretty much following them because they're just basic. I don't kill people.

I don't covet my neighbor's wife. That's a gay thing. But, you know, like. That was actually a property thing, you know. Oh, yeah. The neighbor's wife was his property. By coveting, you mean like taking her. Yeah. But, I mean, the point is that you can live your life as I think both of us do.

And probably most of your listeners do by it. You can have a set of principles that has nothing to do with religion and which is what waking up is about. Yeah. That's exactly what waking up is about. And that's, that's the crazy part of what the left is doing here. You know, there's this onslaught against new atheists. So it against Sam and Richard Dawkins and Hitchens,

even though he's not around anymore. And I didn't know what new atheists were even. So I started asking some people and my friend Kyle said, he said, I think it's just an atheist who's finally saying I'm here. Because for a long time,

atheists wouldn't even say that they were here. And now you have the far left is the ones that are attacking atheists. Isn't it supposed to be the far right attacking the ones that are attacking atheists. Isn't it supposed to be the far right attacking the people who don't want anything to do with religion? It's incredibly warped. Yeah, it is incredibly warped and it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. And there was a really, really recent, um, have you seen Sam Harris's, uh, there's something I tweeted

a few days ago, uh, Sam Harris on, it's on something called secular talk. It's on YouTube. Yeah. So Kyle is the guy Yeah, so Kyle that I just he's the friend that said to me about the new atheist thing Yeah, so they picked up basically where our conversation Ended because when I did that and then you can play a clip No, no, I'm not but I was gonna say that Sam snap he snapped I wouldn't say snap but by his I Brett and yeah, he said snapped. Yeah, that's how he described it, too But he expressed himself about what's really going on with these people, whether it's Greenwald

or, I'll let him pick who it was and what it was. But if you listen to it, it's the thing, the channel on YouTube is called Secular Talk and the title of it is Sam Harris on progressivism, torture, religion, and foreign policy. It's fucking fantastic because he's so elegant, eloquent elegant as well, but eloquent and he just nails it Perfectly expressed what's going on? So is that the inherent problem then because what I see when I did my sit down with Sam I laid it out very clearly I said him Sam Let's take the five things that people misquote you about the most and let's make it very YouTube friendly so that when these crazy people are screaming about you, anyone on Twitter can be like, here's

a link, give it five minutes. So we did it. And he laid out, uh, you know, the profiling, he laid out the nuclear first strike. He laid out all Muslims, uh, verse Islam, you know, all the Islam is the mother load of bad ideas, which he did backtrack a little bit. Cause again, it's about, it's about ideas, not the slanders right so that's how we laid it out and then we and then we did the whole thing and i felt when i was done with that sit down again this was my first episode of my show i was like i'm done with this topic i i felt i had added a little something to this i had helped the discourse a little bit and then suddenly right after that they all were worse all of them glenn reza that, they all were worse. All of them. Glenn, Reza, Cenk, they all doubled down.

Literally, Glenn retweeted a misquote from our interview that Sam said it was something about, Sam mentions profiling and he's talking about Jerry Seinfeld. He's talking about Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian Jerry Seinfeld, should not be profiled. That this is a guy who should be able to walk right through because it's a silly use of resources. Glenn retweets something where they said people who look like Jerry Seinfeld. Completely not what he said. Well, first of all, Jerry Seinfeld easily could be Arab.

So that's ridiculous. I think one of his parents is Syrian, actually. That's a ridiculous thing to say. Right, so not look like him. By the way, when Sam does the profiling, he talks about how he should be profiled. Based on his own looks? Yeah.

Because he's a middle-aged man. And if a middle-aged white guy, whatever, he's not even talking about the race in this instance. That if me or you, if me and you were right now going LAX, that we should be profiled. They should look at two guys of a certain age and whatever, whatever their criteria are, not based on race or religion, but there should be some more, they should look at us in a more curious way than perhaps an 80 year old Dutch woman that's in a wheelchair or something. You know, like he's trying to have smart profiling or what he calls anti-profiling. The problem with profiling really is you're getting profiled by people that are so fucking

dumb they work for the TSA. Right. So that's a real issue. Right. Because I read this whole thing that they give people, like recognizing facial expressions, like get the fuck out of here. Have you ever paused for a minute when you're looking for something and been a fly on the wall while the TSA agents are talking to each other about what they want to eat or what

this bitch was saying to me and barely paying any attention. They're just folks working a job. You know, that's what they are. They're folks that got a job. Well, to that point, I mean, look, if we really wanted to profile in the, in the way that profiling should be done, then you have to do it the way the Israelis do it, which is that you're, they have cameras on everybody watching every bit of body language and every bit of nuance. I mean, even I went to Israel, I think, in 97. And I, to get in, had to go in a separate room. And they asked me every question you could possibly think of. I'm a Jew from Long Island.

I was profiled. You know what I mean? They're not doing it out of fun. They just don't want their planes to explode. And I had to explain something about where my bar mitzvah was. I mean, really crazy shit, but I'm pretty sure they would prefer not to have to do that. And I didn't walk away going, oh man, profiling like that. That's the worst thing in the world. There, there are certain things that are, these, this is, this is a very difficult discussion to have because the social justice warriors make it so that even when we're talking about this now, there's this feeling that somehow I'm for profiling.

I think they should just be ignored, these so-called social justice warriors. And I think that as time's going on, they're becoming so ridiculous that they're easy to ignore. They're doing it to themselves. There was a great story that I tweeted a couple days ago. great story that I tweeted a couple days ago. Anti-feminist speaker disinvited to uncomfortable learning, in quotes, lecture series because she made students uncomfortable. But don't they have safe spaces for that? But listen to this, man.

The thing is called uncomfortable learning. That is the lecture series. Okay. And they disinvited her because she made students uncomfortable. I mean, this is fucking madness. I mean, this is exactly what we're talking about here. Also, think how dangerous it is to do this to college kids more than anything else. Because, first off, you're drugging the kids, right?

We know that they're all on Ritalin and all that shit, right? SSRIs. They're on all that. Now they go to college. Even the ones that aren't on that shit. They go to college. SSRIs. They're on all that.

Now they go to college. Even the ones that aren't on that ship. They go to college. College is supposed to be where you figure out what your sort of base ideas are before you go out into the real world. If you're going to silence... You know, colleges, Brandeis University silenced Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Yes. I have her on my show next week.

I want to go into that. Like, what insanity. You know what I mean? How could they? I mean, it's perverse at the highest What is their their dispute because I think they're the argument was that she doesn't like Islam But she was raised in it almost killed her worker van goes grandson or whatever was killed. Yes on the street in Holland Yeah

For a cartoon. Yeah, and she's talking about ideas again. She and this is what Sam says all the time We have to talk about ideas, not people. What other set of ideas would we be afraid to talk about? What is going on in universities, though? Is it the students that are dictating the policy by protesting? And is it the professors? I think it's coming from the professors, partly for what you said before about Affleck. Like there's this idea if you want to be a professor sort of and Gad Saad talks about this a lot because he is a college professor. And I know he's had his struggles

as someone that is outing this bullshit. I think he's had his professional struggles. I think in our interview, he talked a little bit about some exchanges he's had with other professors where they don't want to touch some of his ideas. Right. Because of,

not that he's talking about anything really controversial at the end of the day. They don't want to touch it, but it's because of the pressure from the day. They don't want to touch it. But it's because the professor, the pressure rather from the students. No, I think it's coming first. I think it's coming first from the professors or even whatever is above that. I don't know if it's the administrations or even whatever is above that. Like, I don't know how high you have to go with it. But I don't think it's the kids that are doing it. I think they're being fed shit and they're being fed fear and stupidity and then they just bounce you know they just sort of rally around there's also a real problem in colleges i believe that these people

that operate in academia have only worked in academia and they don't really understand the real world because they they aren't in it and they're in a position of power with young people yeah so their ideas have incredible influence. They're standing on this stage, teaching these lectures, teaching these classes, and they have these young, impressionable people that are listening to them. This gives them a gigantic ego boost. They have this platform and they've never competed in the real world. They've never contributed to the real world other than teaching children. And there's a lot of them like that, that have gone through the educational system and then gone from the educational system directly to teaching. And then this is their

universe. This is how they exist. And these people are pretty much all part of the regressive left. They are pretty much all part of it. So you could think, here's a simple example of this. So there's a difference between debating ideas and hate speech. So let's say somebody that hated Muslim people wanted to speak at a college and was going to talk about how we should kick them out of the country or we should whatever, do horrible things to them. I could see absolutely protest that person. Use your right of free speech and free assembly to protest that person's ideas. Should the college not let them come? You know, if it was purely hate, I suppose. But I know that's a really slippery slope because everyone, you know. Versus you

could take any of these people, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she's not against Muslim people. She's against the doctrine, these ideas. And if we can't make the distinction between hate speech and someone who wants to debate ideas, if you can't do that in college, then where the hell else can you do that? Not only that, try getting some inflammatory quotes by Ayaan Hirsi Ali that you could argue against that aren't really well thought out, that aren't articulate, that aren't based on her personal experiences growing up in this religion her understanding of the scripture like try try try finding some ignorant hate in that but look you're not going to these guys don't want to debate ideas it's it's really as simple as that so at the very personal level i can tell you so you've had jank on he was my former boss for two years at tyt he watched the original thing with Sam and then sat down with Sam for three hours. Did you see any of that?

Yes, I did. I watched the whole thing. Three hours. I watched that thing. I was working for him at the time. Literally, I was like this the entire time because I was having a headache because I could not believe that this person that I work for, who I respect, who I play basketball with every Sunday, that he was so dense to the ideas that Sam was portraying. And at the end of it, just as I said to you before that, at the end of mine, I thought I had made this conversation a

little bit better. Cenk only doubled down on all of this shit because they don't want to debate ideas. They want they just want Sam to be discredited so that their ideas win. And that's why we have to fight against it. Because if Sam disappears, as I said earlier, if Sam disappears tomorrow, it's not about him. It's about all the ideas that we'll all be afraid to talk about.

That's why Charlie Hebdo cartoons, you should be able to, Family Guy can do whatever the fuck they want on Jesus, right, every episode. There's an episode where Jesus is bathing with porn music in the background in front of Stewie, a baby. Nobody had a problem with that. Try doing that with Mohammed.

But we can't just pick. You can't pick. Say whatever the fuck you want about Judaism. Big goddamn deal. What is it with Cenk? I mean, you know him. That was really perplexing to me because I usually feel like whether I agree with him

or don't agree with him on other things, I feel like he's got an opinion. He thinks about it. He talks about it. He tries to be open-minded. He's passionate about these ideas. But with that, it was so confusing to me because it was almost like he was just trying to win. It was like he was trying to find a way to beat someone who is you know sam is an intellectual black belt i mean like a high level world champion black belt of the the spoken word and i think that

jank is not at the same level as sam when they come when it comes to debating these ideas at one point about 20 minutes in sam does lays out some basic probability stuff and jank just says he doesn't believe in it i mean that that sort of explains it right there like sam wasn't laying out he was just saying this is sort of how probability works right and jank was like no no that oh no i don't i don't believe in it i i don't know and just for the record i i get no pleasure even talking about this because you know you know what you know what it like. Did you debate Cenk or have a conversation with him off the air about this? No, we didn't because it just, it just never materialized. You know what I mean? A lot of times when, although I did do the main Young Turk show with him a lot, most of the time that I was

on it, it was because he was out of town. So I was either filling in or something like that. So there wasn't really the forum for that. And then it really had a lot to do with why I left because I just could not believe it. I mean, there's people that have edited things where Cenk says one thing directly to Sam's face and then days later is saying the complete reverse thing, sitting down with Reza Aslan and saying that, yeah, he means all Muslims. And it's like, you just said to it's like you just said to his face, you just said to his face that, you know, that's not what he says. And I think it's partly it goes to that Affleck thing that he's trying to be this. He's trying to defend Muslim people that he feels

are being abused. And there's a lofty goal there somewhere. But if you use the tactics of dishonesty and slander and smearing and all that to get there you it's not good it's not good so i don't know i don't it's awful but i really like him it's what fucks me up i i feel completely the same way and and actually i in so when i left i just let the thing be and i was like all right right, that's it. You know, I left we left on good terms We went out to breakfast. We were good to go and then he just kept on Twitter kept Lying about it misrepresenting ideas and people and tons of his own fans were turning on him So I just finally after months I was like, I can't take this anymore I've got to do something and I didn't know what I didn't know what to do because you know, it's like it's like Here's a friend. Here's a co-worker a Like, how do I do this in a respectful way? And finally, one night I laid out like eight or 10 tweets in a row. I thought them all through first. And I was like, Cenk, here's what I think is going on. Because I needed it to be public. Because if I had just sent him an email, you know, he could either not respond or respond. But what does that do at the end of the day if me and him get to our mea culpa, but it's not public, right?

the day if me and him get to our mea culpa but it's not public right so i'm very respectful not attacking way i laid out some stuff he completely ignored it a couple weeks went by finally i did something again finally he responded but then just kept doing the same shit so i don't know what the answer is but i but this is what glenn's done this is what res has done i don't get it look these are tactics um these are tactics. These are tactics they're using to win. Majid Nawaz, who I had on my show, who co-wrote Sam's last book, it was a discussion about Islam, called The Future of Tolerance, Islam and the Future of Tolerance. So I'm pretty sure these are people on the side of tolerance, right? Majid, who, by the way, has been treated worse than anybody. You know, like one of these guys that works at the Intercept for Glenn called Majid a porch monkey

while he was sitting next to Sam. You know what I mean? Like, because, oh, you don't believe what we think you're supposed to believe as a Muslim person and you're with an atheist, you're his porch monkey. I mean, think if that came from the right,

how we would rightly react to that or how these guys on the left would react to that. So anyway, so sadly, and that's what leaves me with such like conflict here is that I don't think it's going to stop. And I and I think they've learned, you know, what's that Hitler quote, like the bigger the lie, the more people believe it. I think they're partly operating on that, that the opportunity cost for Sam, for you,

for me, for anyone that cares about any of this to clean up the mess is is way too much for just up Sam's a racist that's that's the one that's easy but now Sam has to clean it up and it's and it's a two-hour frustrated conversation that he had and yeah as you said if you listen to it fucking brilliant brilliant it's a two-hour conversation that is trying to balance out X amount of months of disinformation. But I think that ultimately in the long run, his ideas are more accurate. They're more like what he's saying is well thought through and his opinions are better considered. I think when you say it, can that?

What is with who though? With who? One with you, one with me. Sure. And it won. And look, it won to the point that, as I said before, I think there's a tipping point coming because I do think our side is getting stronger. I really do. But the amount of effort and energy he has had to put into this, and when you see, I think there's a chilling effect. When people see the... I think there's a chilling effect when people see the, I'm not talking about us, when the average person sees what has happened to this guy. Again, you've sat with him for probably 20 hours, never thought he was a racist before. When the average

person sees what they've done to him, it causes the average person not to want to speak about something. I get emails. I'm sure you get them. I got an email a couple of days ago from someone in Sweden saying, I am terrified to talk about any of this stuff. I'm sure you get them I got an email a couple days ago from someone in Sweden saying I am terrified to talk about any of this stuff I'm terrified to talk about what's happening in my country right now Hmm, you know and and I'm getting all emails from all over literally all over from Saudi Arabia and all over the place people saying you're Talking about stuff that people are afraid to talk about I'm not doing it for any other reason other than I feel like I have To it's not you know what I mean? Like I feel like I'm on this road because it just appeared before me.

This wasn't where I really wanted to go. Yeah. My standup was a lot about Transformers and G.I. Joe and stupid shit, you know? Right. So I don't know. Yeah, I don't know either. I don't know either,

but I think that when guys like Cenk do say things that are easily discredited when you say, like, look, you said this are easily discredited when you say, like, look, you said this one thing two days ago when you were talking to Sam. Now you're saying something completely different when he's not here. That is so bad for people's perception of your ideas. It's so bad for your own credibility. It's so bad when you express opinions about other things.

Like, you can say something, like, as a comic comic, you can say things and you can joke around them. And I can know that you're joking. Right. So I can, okay, he doesn't really believe that. And you're fucking around. But this isn't fucking around. So you're being held to your ideas, right? Your ideas, you're held accountable for your ideas.

And when your ideas are massively inconsistent and contrary, days later, and when you're expressing an idea that you have to know is incorrect. Right. So that's the part that I don't understand. Because, look, I have fucked up. We've all done fucked up things in our life. We've all lied. We've all whatever. Maybe you, bro.

Not you. Not you. I know. Maybe you, bro. But you know what I mean? Speak for yourself. We've all made we've all whatever i have maybe you bro yeah not you not you i know but you know what i mean we've we've all for yourself we've all made mistakes of course you know look brian williams made some stupid part ego mistake part whatever you want to call it about they found no they found like 15 different ones and they lied about but but everything being equal they weren't like cataclysmic lies in the scheme of whatever. You know what I mean? In the scheme of things. They were about his little adventures that he exaggerated, partly because of the media,

because the media wants you to be a star, too. So he has to go on The Tonight Show and talk about being on a helicopter, when actually, would Walter Cronkite have done that? Probably not. I don't know. Well, you know, I've got a friend, Steve Renazzisi, and I think you know his story, the 9-11 story. And I think they're really similar, the Brian Williams thing, in that both original stories were actually pretty impressive.

And these guys doctored them up and turned them into this epic thing that ultimately cost them a shitload of credibility, if not all their credibility. With Brian Williams, he was actually in a fucking helicopter in Iraq. The helicopter in front of him was shot at. So that's scary as fuck. You're a reporter. You're getting shot at. You're hearing gunshots go off. The people in front of you are hit. That's a good story.

Your helicopter had to get hit, though, because ultimately these people are full of shit, and they have to exaggerate and jazz it up. They don't. And because of that, you can't trust what they're saying. Right. So then it has that effect where you go, ah, this guy did this.

Exactly. But think about it. Actually, my point was actually the reverse of that. Because what I was going to say is that his lies were little additional details. You know, like I'm a little cooler details. What these guys have done have been to blatantly distort someone's views. So when you do that. But they're talking about an opponent.

That's the difference. Right. Because it's a competition between Cenk and Sam. Right. So, so what do you do with that? So, so what do I say?

I can't, well, I like Cenk, but I'm not turning to him for advice or ideas now. Yeah. I can't. I mean, that's how I feel. When I listen to his, when I listen to his opinions about Well, I like Cenk, but I'm not turning to him for advice or ideas now. Yeah, I can't. I mean, that's how I listen to his when I listen to his opinions about things. I unfortunately have to take into consideration that he's been massively inconsistent about this one thing. So when when someone is caught or exposed or whatever you want to call it to have so severely misrepresented someone else's views, how are you able to separate that from the other the rest? So let's say you like 80% of his views or anybody, we don't have to make it about him.

How do you separate that? Because I, at this point, I don't know how I do it at all. And I know Sam has said that about Glenn, even when it comes to the NSA stuff. He's like, I don't know what to make of that now because I know what this person is capable of. I think that's a really interesting point. It's a very interesting point. It's a very important point because I have people on this podcast all the time that I don't agree with and I want to hear their thoughts. I want to know why,

like I had this conversation with Mark Maron the other night at the comedy store and he was like, why'd you have that guy on? You know, that guy's a this and he's a that. Like, cause I want to find out what makes him tick. I want to find out what goes on in his head. But there's a difference between someone I don't agree with and someone who I know is distorting the views of another person, like changing someone's words, changing someone's intent, and doing it for their own benefit, doing it so that they can win this ideological conversation, this argument. That becomes a real issue. And it also becomes a real issue. It's issues like what if I have having a conversation with you and then two weeks later you distort what I say exactly I don't want to do that I don't I don't I don't want to have to defend my ideas because you've mislabeled them

or miss miss you know misconstrued you know it's funny it's it's also what is so cool about being in the digital space because as I said people are first off people are clipping things you can clip on Twitter Here's what you did. Here's what you did and they can expose them so first off you've been the the People at the bottom of this that are just consuming it are now able to get their voices heard to fight the bullshit Right, and I think that there's been a real wave with that which is incredibly inspiring to me. It's so different Yeah, never before yeah And look see if someone came on here if I come on here

And I said something that was profoundly dishonest or was smearing of someone else I would never hear the end of it right and hopefully people would tag you on Twitter And you'd retweet the shit out of it until everybody had seen you see what fucking Ruben did and right whatever I'm pretty sure that's not gonna happen But you know it doesn't benefit you. You know it doesn't benefit you. Because you can be exposed. That's what I don't understand about these guys. How can you do this?

How can you retweet memes implying that Sam wants to nuke the entire Middle East? First off, his whole thing on nuking the first strike thing, it's at the end of End of Faith. It's about a page and a half. That's how much time he spent on this topic. And they've made it sound like this is his fucking go-to. His position. Yeah. And he's talking about a horrific scenario where some ISIS-type civilization has control of nuclear weapons

and there's a real threat that they're going to use them on other people. Yeah. That's what he's talking about. An apocalyptic regime. That's what he's talking about. You have to consider that if that's a possibility. If it's a possibility that there could be a regime like that somewhere in the world, you have to say, well, what would we do?

What are the options? What could you do in that scenario? To not debate that is to, like, dig your head in the sand. Yes. And that's the bigger problem. Look, what do you think Barack Obama thinks on this? We have nukes right now, right? We know we have nukes.

We're the only country that's used nukes. Do you think that Barack Obama would only wait until we were nuked to use nukes? Probably not, right? I don't know. I mean, I couldn't imagine a scenario with the public. I don't know, but there's at least a discussion there. Yeah, there's a discussion there. And I think that's the deal. It's like a discussion. I think when you discredit people with with dishonest Statements when you say things that you know are not true It becomes a huge issue not not like what you're talking about when you said well I'm pretty sure no one's gonna find

Contradictory statements by me well. It's because there's no benefit in it Yeah, like you like Cank is not going to really gain points by distorting sam's perspectives on things he is only going to gain points of people who don't actually know sam's perspective he's going to lose massively when people do listen to what sam says yeah because then you all of a sudden whatever goodwill and whatever love and appreciation people have for your ideas, that's going to go out the window when they find out that your ideas have been distorted. That your points of view, rather, of other people's ideas have been distorted.

Yeah. I've had that happen to me on this show. I had this show with a guy that I actually like, even though he did this. This guy, Jamie Kilstein. I know him ancillary. This guy, Jamie Kilstein. I know him. He's a social justice warrior. The whole deal. I don't think he's a bad guy. I really don't. I like him as a human being.

Every time I talk to him, I enjoy talking to him. But we did a podcast together, and we disagreed on a bunch of things. Then he went on his podcast and completely distorted everything that I said. And changed the entire conversation to him being a victim which is which is 101 for 101 and then this guy online put together the actual conversation and Jamie's perception of the conversation and it said it was I forget that

like the the Kilstein delusion it was the name of the uh video and because of that he received so much fucking hate and I think that made him because of that, he received so much fucking hate. And I think that made him aware of that. And he said it was like the low moment of his life. And he completely stopped doing that. And he doesn't do any of that shit anymore. And, you know, he's rebounded and now he's happier than he's ever been before. But I think that that type of behavior is not just standard. It's, it's accepted. It's almost expected. You know, it's like what they do. And that's if you're part of that victim culture, the perpetual victim culture, that's how you do it.

You make it seem like people were yelling at you and there's people and they were so upset with me. And all I was doing was trying to say that women shouldn't be raped. That's not what happened. Right. That's not what happened. That must have been incredibly validating for you. Right. Like because it's personal, too. And that's why you can see my body language, probably, when I talk about Cenk. I get no pleasure out of this. This is not how I intend. I didn't go to work for this guy and agree with so much of, you know, get money out of politics, you know, his like core stuff. I didn't go there for my feelings ultimately to be this, but that's where we're at. So in a

case like you're talking about with Jamie, it's extremely validating that you create a space based on a certain amount of principles. Someone goes against them, your audience then calls them out. And then there's like a teachable moment to him. It's pretty, pretty great. I think in that way, it's great. I don't, I didn't take any pleasure in the fact that he got fucked up emotionally because of it. No that but I mean the hate that you get online especially if you like a super sensitive person that's really trolling for love you know you got all your fucking lines in the water and you're trolling for love that's what you're doing and in saying that and even becoming this

victim you're trolling for love I mean that you're trying to do you're trying to get people to fuck Joe Rogan fuck that transphobic homophobic racist sexist misogynistic asshole like throw them all out there throw them all out there i mean but that's what's what what's going on when someone's doing and you got to realize that when you distort people's perceptions or distort people's positions for your own personal benefit, you do yourself a horrible disservice because you now have ruined any validity, any, any, anything that you've said in the past that may resonate with people. You've ruined that because now you've, you've poisoned that well. Yeah. So it can be so laid out clearly like this. Let's say just two of the, the five

things that Sam, sam you know those controversial things so the profiling thing right um are we belaboring this point already because i think it's so i think there's so much to it yeah okay um but let's say sam would argue that because these are debatable ideas we should debate them so imagine if subsequently so they do the three hour sit down he and jank and after that instead of saying he wants to profile muslim people and blah blah blah and all that bravado and bullshit and whatever imagine if he had said you know sam and i really disagree on this i fear that sam's use of anti-profiling or profiling whatever you want to call it i fear that

ultimately it will lead if you you know, for for good. And, you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I think that he's trying to do something good, but ultimately it's going to lead to Muslim people feeling persecuted, feeling like the other. Right. But if he had laid that out like that and had an intellectually honest say, we believe different things here and that's OK. You have a pretty great place to be. Yes. You have a pretty fucking great place to be. People who, who pretty much agree on most things and that we can move forward and go,

we disagree. But when you do what he did, you've, you've just, you've ransacked the playing field. Yeah. And now, and now you just have burned. And that's what it's become. So that's why, when you mentioned Kyle's podcast, that's why Sam, that's as frustrating as I've ever heard him.

But as you said, it was still pretty eloquent and pretty elegant. But he's pissed. He's pissed. And I think rightly so. And that's why I've been so defensive over the guy because I know it's like,

let's have this. If we can't do this now, it's only going to get worse. I have as well. I mean, I've been very defensive of him as well. And unfortunately, I have a good friend, Abby Martin, who I love dearly as well. But she and Sam have gone back and forth about this. And I think she, in some ways, distorts his perceptions.

I mean, I've seen her distort. I don't know her that well, so I don't want to speak for her. I love her. She's awesome. But I've seen her distort a lot of facts on air, too, about different things. She gets very passionate, and I think sometimes she misses the mark on certain things, but she's a very good person, and I think she's ultimately, she has all the right intentions. But the intentions, that's not- Hell, the road to hell.

It's paved with those fucking things. You see what I'm saying, man? Yes. It's paved with those fucking things. You see what I'm saying, man? Yes. It is. It's like with a guy like Cenk, though, I think he's his own worst enemy in that regard. Because once you start doing that, then you have to sort of double down just to try to figure out a more eloquent way of reestablishing your position. And when you do that, people don't take you seriously anymore. Right.

That's the problem. That's a real problem. You become your own enemy. Yeah. You throw out that bomb of bullshit. Yeah. And now you're that, people don't take you seriously anymore. Right. That's the problem. That's a real problem. You become your own enemy. Yeah. You throw out that bomb of bullshit. Yeah. And now you're not going to be. There was a point.

There is. Anytime. Look, if you said something that was completely untrue or you smeared somebody, right? And then two weeks later, you thought it through. Even if you knew you were lying when you did it. But two weeks later, you're like, wow wow I really shouldn't have done that like I intended to do something good there you could backtrack with the value

that you have in your name and your fans they would follow you back yeah a couple people would be like fuck him but people would go and if you calmly explained what happened you could the problem with these guys is they've gone and they kept going and kept going and kept going that they're so off the range now in my view there's nothing they could do to ever fix this situation

it's like a guy saying i know where i'm going but you really don't and then you just keep saying i know where you're going you're lost further and further in the woods like dude you're so far from the fucking road now you're gonna have to shoot yourself and come back as a baby and live your life again because this this is a disaster we've created yeah yeah i just i don't know i don't i don't know how to fix that but i know what it is when i see it yeah well i think this is fixing it i think this is fixing it that that's actually when i woke up this morning and even when i went to bed last night i was like in a great place because i was like i knew i wanted to have this conversation and i try i've had it in little bites on my show but I don't like,

not that this has really been about me because this is about some big stuff, but we're having a little more of a lofty thing here than I would- It is about you in a way because you're a part of this big stuff and also when you're doing your show like the Rubin Report, what you're doing is you're expressing yourself and you become a credible portal to these ideas and information so it is about you in a way because it's about all of us and it's about your credibility as that portal yeah and you you you have to defend that that that's that's fucking look i'm wrong about shit all the time but if i'm wrong about shit dude i'm the first person to tell you i'm wrong about it because i'm. But if I'm wrong about shit, dude, I'm the first person to tell you I'm wrong about it.

Because I'm horrified. Unless it's like some simple, stupid mistake. But when I'm making, if I make a mistake, I want to be the first guy to talk about it. I don't want anybody believing anything that's not true to help my ego. So you've had Cara Santa Maria on, right? Yes. So she's a good friend of mine, worked with me at TYT.

And I am not, yeah, I love her too. She's fantastic. And she is a science communicator. Yes. That's the way she describes herself. I think she had something to do with this brain surgery live thing last night that was on Nat Geo.

Yes. So she's doing really good stuff and I really respect her and like her. I've said to my audience many times, I know a lot about politics, current events, all this stuff. I'm not a science guy. I can understand, all this stuff I'm not a science guy I can understand basic stuff but I'm not a scientist so I have to trust people

that know about science to tell me things so many times I've brought her on just to clean up messes that I've made so I never go with the presumption to my audience that I know everything about everything I'm going to bring on some people. And look, then, so when I've done things on GMOs with Kara, she firmly believes in GMOs.

And that's a whole other thing, right? But I know a lot of people don't like her stance on GMOs. But I say, here's my science person. Here's what she said about this. And I'm actually trying to find someone that's a little more against GMOs now to come on and refute some of that stuff We don't have as the interviewer as the guy on this side of it We don't have to know everything which is what you said before that that does give us a little bit of a leash, right? Because we're sitting across from someone and we're just bouncing ideas. We're also talking about so many different subjects

It's impossible to be an expert in all of that I guess this actually goes to your point about the format of real time in all these shows. Yes. That look at where we bounced here already. You know what I mean? There's only a couple areas where I feel real comfortable in saying I'm an expert. I'm an expert in stand-up comedy

and I'm an expert in martial arts. Yeah. And even in martial arts, there's certain aspects of martial arts where I have to defer to other experts. Yeah. You know, there's just too many styles. There's too's certain aspects of martial arts where I have to defer to other experts. Yeah, you know, there's just too many styles There's too many different there's you know, there's some different weird Filipinos. There's see lot

There's there's different stick fighting styles and like you can't know everything you can't well you can I can't know anything But if you want to see how the thing that you consider yourself an expert in how it how it all sort of leads to One road look what you did with Mencia because you had a set of principles, right? You had a set of principles in something that you love standup, right? I mean, is there anything you love more than standup aside wife and kids? Like, is that it? Yeah. Friends, wife, kids, health. Yeah. But in terms of the other things like standups right there and, and, and what what you did with mencia which i'm sure you've talked about a bajillion times already uh do you remember we met once actually yeah what do we mean we met at the young turks you were going on oh that's right

you were going to do anna's show and we were we were talking for a few minutes and obviously i knew who you were but i didn't want i'm a comic too like i just didn't so we just shot the shit for a few minutes and we talked about that a little bit. But my point is that because you you use the set of principles that are guiding you right now to do this show are the same principles that you use to defend your art in that moment. You know, so all of these things, they all come together one way or another. In some ways. The real problem with that Mencia thing was that the the art form is being compromised, not just by him stealing from other people, but him creating an environment where people were terrified to express themselves. Like,

I mean, look at that social justice warrior, right? That's the same thing that they've done by jank yelling racist. Now, what have you done? Well, sort of,

he was, you couldn't express yourself because he would steal those ideas and call them his own. And that's why there was literally like a signal that people would do where, you know, like you'd be on stage for five minutes, you had a 15 minute set, and all of a sudden five minutes in the light would be on. Like, why is the light on?

I have 10 more minutes to go. It's because Ben Sia's in the room. And they would let people know. They would flash the light. Well, it was a problem. It was a real problem. It was also the people that were running the comic store were fucking retarded.

Yeah. As well as the people that were running these agencies were fucking retarded. Like the conversation that I had with my agents when they were telling me that I had to either apologize to Mencia or they were going to drop me. I go, do you guys understand what you're doing? Because you're making a decision right now. You're calling it business. You're making a decision that's going to affect the rest of your life. You're supporting a criminal.

And all you sell is art. All you sell is art. That's all you guys do. You don't produce widgets. You guys aren't building cars. You guys are sellers of other people's art. That's what an agent is. And what you have here is a guy who's stealing art and selling it.

You have a vampire. And you're taking this vampire. He will suck the blood off the creative geniuses that you have on your roster But meanwhile the opposite happened Louis CK left them immediately David tell left them Nick Swartzen left them People that found out about him went fuck this then he left them So the whole thing was a disaster for Gersh. Yeah from for the agency at the time and you know They've really never recovered. I mean, it's always...

I was with them for a little bit. I left for other reasons. It was a fucking disaster for them. I mean, they lost a fuckload of money because of that one conversation that we had over the phone where I would have stayed with them. I'm like, if you want to defend this douchebag, you know, I don't give a fuck.

He's been my agent for years. You know, I like the guy who I'm not even going to name him. He's a good dude. But he was being put into position by the guy who owned the company that like, look, this guy's calling me up saying he demands that Joe apologized to him and he wants it to be a big deal. And like, fuck you. I'm like, I would rather be homeless. And basically for people to really understand that the reason was because at the time he was a bigger star than you, right? So ultimately that's where the power play was yeah he was on but i was big enough star that i couldn't be hurt by it i was rich yeah i'm like what are you gonna do i'm i was on fear

factor at the time i had all this money and i'm like you can't hurt me and he tried he tried to get me he got me banned from the comedy store he He tried to get my agency. And this is a person, you know, in me where I'm already untouchable in that sense. Like you really can't, you really can't dig in. Like, what are you going to do? You're going to try though. So if I was a young comic coming up, he would have had some real damage. Yeah. He could have done some real damage to me.

Well, I'm sure there's probably untold amount of young comics that he lifted from that you have no idea. Well, a lot of them contacted me while that was going on. And some of them didn't want to be named. And some of them didn't mind if I named them. But I think, honestly, that most likely he stole almost everything he did. And that he stole it from different sources and changed it around. But you've got that with a lot of comics.

You've got that with a lot of really shitty lot of like really shitty comedians make it. And one of the ways they make it is they take other people's ideas and they move them around just enough. Sure. Look, even good comics, look, Robin Williams, who's, you know,

has more talent or had more talent in his finger than I probably have in my whole body, was well known to steal. I know a comic personally, you probably know him too, but I won't name him for the purpose of this, but who Robin stole a bit from, didn't, and then he never told him, but then just sent him a check.

I think he sent him a $15,000 check. He did that to a lot of guys. Well, Robin was much better as a performer than he was as a creative guy, as someone who came up with the ideas. Have you ever heard the phrase parallel evolution? Parallel thinking, I've heard that. ideas have you ever heard the phrase parallel evolution has that uh parallel thinking so i had a comic when i was working in new york that i worked with almost every night and he started lifting from people and we all kind of knew it and he did exactly what you said it was like he would take the premise but then just tweak it enough that every time i'd be watching i'd go you know like but we all knew right and one night i i finally confronted him he's still doing stand

up by the way we've since become friends and he's sort of apologized and whatever. And he said to me one night, he goes, Dave, Dave, don't you know about parallel evolution? The premise being that these jokes just evolve over, you know, if you're talking about sort of current event type things, we're all going to, a certain amount of it's just going to evolve at the same time. And I said, I was about to say his name, but I said, I said, not only are you lifting jokes, you also made up a theory. Like that's pretty, if you could apply that sort of creative thinking to your jokes, maybe we wouldn't be in this problem. And that is part of the problem is that a lot of these people, they have a self-defeating tendency and that self-defeating tendency is that they don't, they're not willing to put in the work because they're afraid of failure. So instead they see success and they just duplicate it and they literally duplicate it in

the premise they duplicate the premises they duplicate the pathway to getting to the end of the joke but the one thing they can't duplicate is you you know what i mean and that that's at the end of the day that's all we have forget whether it's stand-up or whether it's radio or on air like what you have the thing that at the end of the day they come to you is something that you can't really quantify, right? Like you just, people understand a certain series of things about you that they like,

so if the average person, well, why do you like Rogan? They could lay out a couple things, but there's that other thing that just is there. They can't duplicate you, but in the case of a guy like Robin Williams, he can duplicate all the things that you do that people like.

Well, I remember. And that becomes a problem because if he goes on before you, and that was one of the Mencia things that he would do, he would steal someone's bit and then bring them on. Because the comedy store, you tag team. You would go on and you would say, thank you very much. Good night. All right, this next comic is, you know, and you'd bring up your friend. Right. So no MC.

No MC at the comedy store. And he would bring on guys right after he did their closing bit and he would do it to fuck with them and he would do it because he had some power you know and because the mexican community is desperately looking for star comedians i mean they have uh they have a few of them i mean this is like george lopez was always a big one and gabriel um gabriel iglesias is a big one he sells out everywhere but he's a really nice guy and the difference being that Mencia is not really Mexican that was you know it was he was completely concocted yeah and that's what really did him in more than anything well it's like what found out it was a

fake name what wait what was his real name yeah Ned Holness something and what about what's the other one they're one of the redneck guys real what's an electric Bob or? Frigerator Sal What's his real name and he's yeah, Dan Whitney and it's like yeah, but Dan jokes Yeah, I don't mind someone like dice clay his real name isn't dice clay. Yeah, it's Andrew Silverstein I was you know, I was at a party a couple weeks ago and and dice was there and I was never a huge huge fan of His but i do remember around whatever that was maybe 89 90 maybe a little later when he sold out the garden

and when he was in that you know that year of just thunder sanity i remember watching that and thinking like this is incredible like it was one of the things that really sparked me with stand-up because even though i didn't love the material and i understood that how stupid the jokes were sort of but i was like the power of this is fucking amazing yeah and so i went up to him at this party and i tapped my shoulder and i just said and dave comic blah blah he was like yeah good and i walked away like i was like wow because i've had such good i'm sure you've had this too when you when you've met comics over the years that you really admire yeah pretty much every single one that i've ever admired when i lived on the upper west in new york i lived about two blocks away from seinfeld so i'd bump into him a lot and he

was a little hot and cold but like basically like there was the comic bond you know what i mean like yeah and i was just dice was just like he was so over it oh yeah that's unfortunate he's he's become his persona yeah i like diceice. Well, he's dressed the way you think he's. But you know, he wasn't always that guy. Like that dressing, that whole thing, that was a character in Andrew Silverstein's act. Like

the Dice man was a guy he would do that was basically Jerry Lewis and the Nutty Professor. Like if you've never seen the Nutty Professor, it's a great movie. And one of the things that's great about it, it's Jerry Lewis is like this nerdy guy

who takes a potion. It was a potion, I think it was? Yeah, yeah. And he becomes this super cool daddy-o guy. You know, this is like 19-fucking-whatever-it-was.

50-something. Yeah, probably. And it's a hilarious movie because, you know, ultimately this guy, you know, becomes this guy that the ladies love and

then the potion starts wearing off and he goes back to being his nerdy self again and dice is that guy i mean that's that's who he is on stage well it was only a part of his act and then it became the best part of his act and then it became his act then it became him outside it's like so now you see him walking around the street he's got the weightlifting gloves on he's got a fucking gold jacket that's fucking it's got all the glitter on it and shit it's bedazzled i mean it's he's uh i i i i'm happy he exists though i enjoy him oh for sure and think about like the fact that at that if you you watch that Madison Square Garden special, which it's all on YouTube, you can watch it. People are announcing the jokes before he even finishes the premise.

Like that's that was the power. That's where it showed to me the power of stand up. Like I always love. I remember what got me into stand up was I was four years old. Nineteen eight or six, maybe 1983. I saw Bill Cosby himself on HBO and and i was on the floor even though i probably didn't really understand what he was talking about i thought this was the greatest thing ever yeah you know you're grown up by the way when uh your childhood hero becomes a serial rapist

maybe the most successful serial rapist ever of all time yeah um but that that sparked it in for me that sparked laughter and wanting to make people laugh and loving comedy for me. But the Dice thing was like, holy shit, this is a real, now I understand the show, too. Well, his stand-up was different in that not only did you know the punchline, but the whole audience would sing it like a song. Yeah. So they wanted to hear the same jokes again, which is very different from other stand-up. With stand-up, most of the time you want to hear the new bits. That's what people want to hear, shit they haven't heard before.

Sure. And I know that even talking about Cosby, it's hard to do at this point because everyone associates such terrible stuff. But I did see him live a couple times. And one of the most amazing things that I ever saw a comic do ever was that everyone knew that whole himself special. Every comic loved it pretty much so many from chris rock to seinfeld to a zillion people credit that with like being one of their seminal things in the records and all that and i saw cosby maybe 10 years ago in jersey and he was doing all new stuff and you know it was kind of you know by his last 10 years haven't

been that kind to him and even just the way he looks and he's had some health things like just what none of it was that great but then at the end he goes i'm gonna do one old bit for you and he said i know you all know it i know you all know it but i'm gonna do one old bit for you and he did the dentist routine and everyone knew it but he was such a master that he was it was like watching him it was like watching someone with clay because he could take the laughs before they were coming and then just change it enough to keep them going more and they weren't yelling out the punchlines because it wasn't as you know like didactic or just set as as dice but like it was it was amazing to watch to do comedy and invent your old bit that you've now reinvented a thousand

times and they know it all and it was like as as good as ever. It was amazing to watch. Well, his old stuff, I mean, in the time, and that is a thing that you need to take into consideration when you watch stand-up, is that stand-up is sort of a time machine. It's a time capsule. And that's why you can go back and listen to Lenny Bruce, who is arguably the most important stand-up comic ever. And he's not very funny. It's just not. It's not very good today. And this is coming from someone who has Lenny Bruce posters who is arguably the most important stand-up comic ever. Yeah. And he's not very funny. Yeah. It's just not. It's not very good today.

And this is coming from someone who has Lenny Bruce posters framed in his house. And I have Lenny Bruce live at the Fillmore in my office. I mean, he's, in my opinion, the most important guy ever. Well, he changed the art. Definitely. He simply, he just fucking tore the thing down. We are not going to do jokes like that. We're going to talk about real shit.

And he opened it for everybody yeah period and i think that's often the case with uh a lot of the greats like a lot of the old carlin stuff is in that vein like i understand its position in the history but if you watch it or listen to it today it's really not that good you know it's interesting that's the case with cosby as well so So, so Cosby for, well, and especially now Cosby has this other thing attached to him that it's, it just becomes. Impossible to remove. Yeah. It's so lined up together.

Carlin. So I had Kelly Carlin on this week, who's George's daughter, who's a good friend of mine. And we talked a lot, we talked about that and we related it all to everything else we've been talking about here, the social justice stuff and language and words and, you you know being afraid to hear certain ideas and all that so it was a really really interesting conversation and uh i watched a bunch of george's stuff just in preparation i've seen it all a thousand times but i thought actually a lot of it still does stand some of it yeah the seven dirty words sort of seem ridiculous now in a certain way, but it's still pretty good. Like, and even his last HBO special

is fucking perfection. It, I, I, I've asked her this before. He knew his health was failing at the time. I don't think he knew he was going to die only a few months later, but in a lot of ways, if you watch it, knowing that he perhaps thought it was his last special, it brings it to a whole other level because he ends it really just wrapping up like wrapping up a 40 year here's what i think about everything it's it's pure brilliance well he uh did a new special every year so when you have that much material you're gonna have some hits and some misses but he certainly had way more hits than he had misses sure he had he had like a five year i think sort of lull i guess maybe in the mids or something, where I thought it became just too much about cursing and whatever. But beyond that, that guy... stuff if you go back to when he looked like a weatherman oh you're talking about before he became the george carlin for sure yeah if you go back and put that time capsule and try to like

watch that today it's not really that funny you know who is really interesting the old stuff is woody allen woody allen's also first of all he's a fucking total pervert in his old stuff well it all sort of wow this is so weird yeah well look it all leaked into his movies, like all his strange sexual stuff and young girls and, you know, how old was Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan? Well, first off, she played underage, and I don't know how old she was. Yeah, she was like 17 or something. How old was she? She was, yeah.

Well, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. But yeah, but comedy is in a weird way. Like, here's a good example. Eddie Murphy Raw at the time was like this monster stand up thing that everybody had to see. Oh, my God, I saw it. I was crying. Try watching that today.

First of all, you want to talk about homophobia, not just homophobic, but violently, aggressively homophobic. Yeah. Which is really weird when you consider all the allegations that have surfaced since with him and transgender people and transsexuals and picking up hookers that were men. Like, it's very, very strange. Isn't it funny that we try to get, look, who was it? Oscar Wilde said, you know, if you want to tell people the truth, you have to be funny. I think it was Oscar Wilde.

Maybe it was Lily Tomlin. Am I totally? I can't remember. I think it was one of them. I don't know how I those. It was the Lily Tomlin. I can't remember. It was one of them. It was the Dice Man! I said it! Oh! But, you know, it's funny that we try as a society, like

so many of the people that, of course, that we admire but that everyone admires are comedians because we're supposed to tell the truth. We are supposed to tell the truth. And then at the same time comedians are often either the sad clown or severely emotionally crippled or wanting that approval thing before

and all the lines that you were talking about. And it's a really bizarre place. So then when you get, you suddenly get all that approval and then it's like, can you still also grow as a human while you're getting approval

from something that came out of some dysfunction. Yeah. You know, and I know this is the endless comedian discussion. Yeah. You have to adjust what, why you do it. You know, you have to do it for other people instead of doing it for yourself and you have to do it for the, for the art, for the work.

Yeah. And the work is profoundly enjoyable for people that love standup. It's like if you're a painter and you only paint for yourself, well you know at a certain point in time you're running out of shit to paint Yeah, you know when you're painting I guess expressing yourself for the desires of other people. I think then it becomes different Yeah, I saw George Carlin Once just a little bit before he died also on the view and he was talking about the art. Oh good lord Oh, man, poor guy. I took years off his life we maybe still have george today if he didn't make it but i think he died that later that day um um but he said he said

something that i thought was really great he said you know he said when i became a good comic was when i got over the need yeah and i think that it's a good lesson for humans in general just for people like getting over the need whatever the need is of yourself. And we all struggle with this. Of course, I struggle with it as a person and as a comic and a host or whatever it is. Like we all have that shit and wanting all that approval, but we can get over that and just, and really do things for the right clean reasons and, and live in a, and at the same time, live in a way that honors all those things that you stand up for. I think that's like the secret.

Like that's the sauce. Like that's what we should all be trying to do. And it transcends, you know, profession. It transcends comedy and it transcends everything pretty much. Yeah, I think you're on to it. you're onto it and I think also that that process of like the need is it's that's the fuel that gets you off the earth and away from the effects of gravity and then the momentum of that sort of carries you on but you don't necessarily have to keep that fucking jet engine fire under your asshole all

the time yeah it's but that doesn't that explain sort of like why angst and being fucked up or whatever, you know, when they say comics are all fucked up or whatever. You need a certain amount of that. Oh, you do to get going. You need it.

And look, I did stand up. Think about this. I did stand up. We've only known each other for whatever it is, two hours now. I just ended up for about 10 years in the closet. Now, I was mostly doing political stuff

and social stuff. It wasn't like, I wasn't like outwardly lying all the time and being like, fuck this chick and that, you know, like it wasn't like that. But like, I constantly was avoiding the truth on stage. Or if, you know, if I was getting heckled, there were easy ways that it would imply that I was straight or, and I'm sure times, I'm 100% sure there were times

that I made it seem like I was straight or something like that. Right, right. But that angst and that fuel really made me successful really quick. Like, I was passed at the comedy cellar like a year into doing stand-up. And then a couple years later, like, it basically all crumbled on me because I realized that my life, my person life, was way behind where my art was and then i ended up doing gay shows which is another fucking nightmare because if you're a gay comic they have like one at every club right like there's there's sort of one like stereotypical gay comic and then suddenly i was the gay comic

and i don't act that gay whatever the hell that means so i wasn't even gay enough for them then i ended up then i ended up on a gay tv channel on Here TV which was this premium gay channel and then I ended up on the gay channel on SiriusXM I wanted to talk about politics and instead I was fucking interviewing real housewives and you know all that shit and it had nothing nothing to do with anything

I wanted to do so everybody's path is crazy and weird. Well your path's always going to be crazy and weird because we're human beings. And I think you're onto it as far as this fucked up aspect of you that needs love so badly. You want to go on stage with a spotlight on you and a microphone to amplify your voice. Listen to me. Pay attention to me. And then once you get to that position, it's up to you to figure out the trick

yeah because if you're a musician a magician and you believe that you're really pulling a rabbit out of a fucking hat you're an idiot you know like you're you're the guy with the trick and the trick is you know your voice is amplified you're on the stage you figured out the cadence and the hypnotic rhythm in order to get people to laugh at your stuff. But what, what, what are you actually trying to do if you're still trying to fill holes? Well, you've, you fucking missed it, son. That's just supposed to get you to the dance. And once you're at the dance, then it's supposed to be about creating the art. Then it's supposed to be about trying to figure out what is the best way to make something really funny. What is the best way to make something? So I, I contribute to culture. I contribute to people's entertainment value.

They go out, they can say, hey, Dave Rubin is at the Ice House tonight. Let's go on out and have a good time. And they leave there and they go, that was fun. Oh my God, that was great. And that's the goal. The goal is to, you're changing the way people feel. And you can do that with ideas and you got to work them through. But yeah, what gets you to the dance in the first place is your fucked up past. way people feel and you can do that with ideas and you got to work them through but yeah what

gets you to the dance in the first place is your fucked up past your angst your insecurities your all that shit it's a matter of the people that cling to those things and that never get them never get rid of them then they make it and they don't know what the fuck to do so that that's the the really interesting part to me because so i lived on the upper west as i said but there's a zillion microphone closer to you yeah sorry you'll hear people hear it more because we can hear each other yeah when i get deep i start leaning to my left um so i lived on the upper west which is like a bastion of comedians there's just a zillion comics that live up there seinfeld lived up there and elaine boosler lived up there and

taylor negron who i met right before he. Didn't even know I met him just a couple of weeks before he was going to do my show. He was a great guy. Great, great, great guy. And just a zillion, a lot of younger comics, whatever. But one, I used to see Greg Giraldo all the time. He lived a couple of blocks away from me. Another great guy. And so I think you'll find this really interesting. I didn't know him personally, but he knew I was a comic. We just sort of nod when we were walking by. And one day I saw him walking his two kids. He had his two young sons hand in hand and he was

walking between them. And I thought, wow, like that there, there's a guy who I respect as a comic, like doing good shit. He's funny. He's real. You could always tell there was like some pain there, but like doing it, you know, he's getting certain chances. Like, I think he never got like maybe whatever would have been his big chance, but like he was in the mix and respected. And anyway, then the next day after that, I saw him, I went to Equinox was the gym I went to on the upper West. And I saw him there and he was working out.

And I was like, look, there's a guy just on with his kids. He's working out. Like it's all seems like it's working for this guy. Like it actually gave me hope. Like, oh, I can become like a functioning person that weekend that weekend he was dead i mean but with him i don't know enough about him well i know him yeah and it was it was a pill thing it was a drug thing you know and that's um incredibly unfortunate i knew him when he had a television show because when Greg had, he had a show, um, cause you know, Greg started out as a lawyer and he had a show on one of the networks.

I think NBC, right? I don't think so because I was on NBC at the time and I don't think we're on the same network. Um, I think it was ABC, but that doesn't matter. What matters is we were on the same lot. We were both on that Sunset Gower lot that I was talking about. And we were next door to each other. So I'd hang out with him. We're just fellow comics. And that's the bond that we shared.

He had a lot more responsibility than me because I was on this giant ensemble where I was the fifth or sixth person when the credits roll. It would be like, Phil Hartman or Dave Foley, Maureen Taney. So I had no pressure, but he, he had the Greg Giraldo show. I don't remember what it was called, but it was, it was his show. And, uh, you know, he went from that and then he, you know, was really a big part of tough crowd with Colin Quinn. And there's that great moment where he shut down Dennis Leary on, uh, on tough crowd. It was like one of all-time favorite moments on Tough Crowd because Dennis was getting upset that Greg Giraldo had written jokes.

He had funny things to say about certain things. He goes, yeah, Dennis, that's what we do. We write. We write jokes. And it was just a classic moment. Dennis is wearing sunglasses. It's inside. Right, like Greg's in the prime and Dennis is coming in.

It's just horse shit yeah um but he he was a guy that i think was really respected by a lot of other comedians was really good at roasts yeah and in today's day you know i mean he died a few years back he probably would be just right now crushing it like bill burr is you know he'd be right now like be in his stride because i think that what he was doing and what he was was really good. Yeah. But that goes to that thing. But demons, man.

Demons. I mean, think about that. Literally the day before, I'm looking at this guy going, holy shit, like, he's doing it. That pill demon is a different monster. Yeah. The opiate addict, you know, that's a different monster. You know, the person who does meth or coke or, you know, the people that go hard. That's a totally different monster.

Yeah. It scares the shit out of me, man. I mean, I smoked a ton of pot in my day like that. You smoked a ton of pot yesterday. Yeah. I got my card a couple weeks ago, actually. Good for you. Yeah, I went to the 420 doctor on Melrose.

Yeah. You know the 420 doctor. It's so hard to get a prescription, isn't it? I thought. You have to go through a battery of tests oh my god it was like a day of like probing

and I thought I was being like taken by aliens we're joking by the way folks you have to be a fucking idiot to not get a prescription so I could not believe how easy it was I mean I could

I went in I literally I was like ah well I guess like I just wanted weed to smoke weed I don't have any real physical ailments but I was like

I'll tell them I get headaches my knees hurt after I play basketball back pain i mean the woman looked at me like shut the fuck up you know and then i went into i had never been to one of the stores one of the dispensaries went in there for i still can't believe i've only been there a couple times now but i can't believe like just the level of it's a real salesperson you know candy and edibles and oil you know careful she wanted oils and uh so there's oils what else a wax i was like do you have any weed and weed form like is there any is that it left anymore like just some buds so i got i got oil it's all there's it's available but yeah the problem is once you uh once you go down to the first floor you you want to go, is there a basement down there?

Yes, there is a basement. What's that door in the basement? Ooh, that's the sub-basement. Yeah. Let's look in the sub-basement. And then you start going deep, and next thing you know, you're in a spiral staircase. How much pot do you smoke? I smoke a fair bit, depending upon whether or not I'm at the comedy store or not.

I enjoy getting high and going to the comedy store. I like to get high before I do jujitsu. I like to get high before I give the missus a stabbing. Nice, nice. I like to get high before I get in the isolation tank. Isolation tank. I want to talk about that. I need to do that.

I enjoy marijuana. Yeah. It's one of my friends. Yeah, I can tell. I mean, you lit up. I like it. It's great. And also, I like the fact that I represent the opposite of the stereotype.

Right, you're doing shit. Yeah. Well, I don't buy it. I don't buy that marijuana makes you lazy. I think you're fucking lazy. I think you could be lazy and eat Cheetos. Does that mean Cheetos make you lazy? You could be lazy and watch TV.

Does that mean TV makes you lazy? I don't buy it. Yeah. I think we're looking for some reasons why people have flaws in their personality. And I don't think you could say it's marijuana. Does marijuana have all good aspects to it? No. Like many things.

It has good and bad. The bad thing is the memory. The memory thing is a bad thing. What were we talking about? But that's fleeting. Like long-term memory. My long-term memory is fucking fantastic. It has to be because with the UFC, look, I have a bio when I do the UFC, which will tell me like a fighter's record, tell me who they're training with and tell me.

But when the matches are going on, I'm not leafing through papers. If I start talking about a fight that happened seven years ago in another organization, it's because it's in my head. Yeah. You know? And when I talk to people and they're like, what kind of preparation do you do? I'm like, I'm not doing any preparation. The preparation that I'm, well, I am, but I'm not. The preparation that I'm doing, I would do anyway.

I want to watch their fights because I know they're coming up. So I'll watch their shit if I need to know about some of their training methods. But those are things that I will do because i'm curious about i want to i want to broaden my understanding of what their preparation is that because i want to enjoy the fight more and i'll enjoy the fight more if i do that and then i express that but all that stuff is off memory it's there yeah so when i'm doing like how much how many notes do you have in front of you that i write zero of any so if you hear me talking about old matches and stuff like that all that shit is in my head.

I have to have good memory. And if I really thought that pot was fucking with that, I would stop smoking pot. But it doesn't. But it'll fuck with like, what were we just talking about? It'll do that. Well, you think Twitter's doing that too. I'm a firm believer in that, that all of these things and having this phone constantly, that that's fraying. I mean, I'm talking really just splitting and disintegrating people's memory

and especially short-term memory. I see on my show all the time now, comics or anyone will be on just talking about anything and suddenly they forget what they're saying. I'm not talking about 70-year-old people. I'm talking about 30-year-old people. You know, there used to be a time if you were going to meet a buddy out for,

or you're going to meet a girl for a drink or something, you're waiting on a corner and she's going to be, and she's five minutes late. You'd have to stand there and just yep and wait think about some shit and look at the sky and people watching whatever but now you immediately do this and not only do you immediately do it you can immediately scroll and see an approval approval approval they love me they love me they hate me they love me whatever it is and all of that and it goes to what we started with this whole thing about and six second videos

And all of this shit and this bounce back of why people like this now is because all of this I really think is is They've done studies where it's actually rewiring Synapses and all this stuff. It's changing people's brains And that's the internet is actually having a physical effect on us That's not just our necks are hung over. That neck thing is real, man. Yeah. They're worried that people are going to, like older people of our generation and before,

are going to have real issues with their neck because they're always looking down. Yeah. And that in looking down like that, you're stretching the ligaments and stretching your neck and putting pressure on your discs. I feel it. I feel even when I'm holding my ipad i feel like i've done something to my pinky like my pinky has like i'm not kidding like i've got like two little indentations here because i'm holding this thing all the time like this you know i mean really

people you do all kinds of weird you know how if you're writing i'm a lefty so like uh if i'm writing like i have a little indentation on my index finger because the pen is always lying there like you actually can physically change your body by some of this Technological unquestionably I used to have from writing from drawing I used to have a big callus on the inside of my fuck you finger Extra well was not it was not that but I mean it's just from I drew Yeah, like hours and hours every day when I was young and I always had these like big calluses all over there and they've all gone away now. It's interesting how that happens. You got to start drawing again.

Yeah, maybe. But the neck thing is a real, real concern. The eye thing's gotten me. I mean, obviously your eyes degenerate as you get older. That's a thing about close vision. But with me, I think it's got to be connected at least somewhat to staring at screens. I know that's bad for you. You're focusing on any short term, like something that's really close to you.

And who the fuck was it that was on the podcast that referred to it as like a cast? I don't remember who it was. Oh, it was a woman who sleeps on the ground. Remember the chick who, she doesn't sleep on beds, and she's got this interesting Kathy. Is her name Kathy? Whatever, Jamie will find it. But anyway, the way she described it was she was saying that when you're staring, Kathy Bowman?

Yeah. Yeah. Katie Bowman. Thank you. Katie Bowman. She said when you're staring at one distance all the time, like the distance between your face and your laptop or your face and your phone, is that your eyes are supposed to look at close things and far things

and look at this broad range of distances. And instead, you're only looking at something right in front of your face, and it fucks with literally the shape of your eye. Yeah. And then your body doesn't know what the fuck to do I mean think about it our grandparents or even our parents when my dad was born. There was no such thing as television Mmm, I'm 39 years old. That's insane, right? So our grandparents had no screens that didn't even have radio right radio adjusts maybe started whatever it was night

When do radio start? Early 1900s. Right, okay. So my grandparents were probably- World Wars? Yeah. Was that 1920s? Yeah. So, I mean, really think about that, how we've changed in 100 years.

And as you were talking about earlier about how the internet's going to change us and we're learning so much more faster and all that, that now it's so involved in this digital. I mean, it's the matrix is becoming real. Like ultimately, we're just the batteries for these things to keep going. You know, like we're just putting information, we're putting whatever our spirit is, whatever you want to call that, is just the battery for this digital thing to exist.

Do you know who Marshall McLuhan is? I don't think so. He's a fascinating thinker and author from like the 50s and 60s. I think it was and he he was a part of He was a part of the counterculture in a lot of ways a lot of people quote him But one of the things that he said about this is technology before computers He said human beings are the sex organs for the machine world and the idea that we we exist to create these machines and i i firmly believe that what we're doing is we are some sort of a

technological caterpillar and we're giving birth to a new life form i really really believe that and i think that elon musk and what he said about summoning the demon in the form of artificial intelligence yeah i don't think that's off at all. I think there's going to come a time, whether it's 100 years or 1,000 years, human life and the biological limitations of our own cellular bodies, it's going to be ridiculous.

We're just going to get rid of them. Yeah. I mean, I don't think it's going to be that long, 100 or 1,000. Forget 1,000. Well, 1,000, we're going to be long gone from this Earth. Maybe. You think so?

People won't be around a thousand years? I think we'll have, I think, no, I think a lot of people are probably going to die here on our dying planet. And, you know, rich people mainly are going to be able to escape. With spaceships? Yeah. We're going to go to. Where are we going?

We're going to, well, I guess we've given up on the moon, right? Now, you know, we're going to, but we're going to go, we're going to well i guess we've given up on the moon right now you know we're gonna but we're gonna go we're gonna find something we are gonna find something that has some of the basic building blocks of life like earth uh-huh you know look you know carl sagan our our sun is not spectacular by any stretch and we know that there's billions and billions of suns in this galaxy in this universe you know that whole. And it endlessly extrapolates. And all we are just a tiny rock with that had the right distance from the sun and the right amount of chemicals to make all this shit happen. We're going to find something that's going to be similar to this, but maybe it'll, it'll all be 10 degrees hotter. And because of that, everything

will have evolved slightly differently. Or maybe, you know, you could pick like, I love Star Wars. You could pick any of those planets, you know, like it just evolved differently. There'll be a planet that's mostly water and we'll have to eventually learn how to deal with that. Unless the guys get here first and kill us. That's possible too. That is possible. But I think that our own biological limitations, our own organisms are so acutely adapted to this environment, to the environment of planet Earth, that it would be insanely difficult for us to colonize another planet.

Oh. Insanely problematic when it comes to dealing with whatever life is already there, dealing with the environment, dealing with... It'd be better to just fix this spot. Oh, I hope we can. This spot's fucking falling apart.

We have a shitty old car, and we're like, let's just abandon it and leave it on the lawn and move to the neighbor's house. Yeah. I mean, that's really the idea, but the neighbor's house is on fire all the time, and it gets pelted with asteroids. I think we're going to put all of our effort into flying to some other planet, and on the way there, their sun's going to supernova. And then we're going to blow up in the middle of space, and all hope will be lost. That's what I think. Wow, I've been feeling so inspired by this conversation,

and now you've... People back here on Earth are just going to regroup and go, you know what, let's stop trying to go to space and just clean the ocean. Yeah, I really think something about humans, something about, look, right now, even if we cut, and again, I'm not a scientist, but even if we cut our greenhouse gases here in America and we do all this stuff, India,

these developing nations, China, they're going through what we went through 60 years ago. So when we have the UN meet and try to get everybody to come up with, you know, numbers that we're going to allow to put out this much smog and this much, all this bullshit. It's like, what right do we have to tell them not to do everything they can to advance just the way we did 50 years ago. So no matter, so it's funny. And I live in West Hollywood. There are no plastic bags.

Right. And they don't even want to give me a paper bag at Trader Joe's anymore. You know, you have to pay for it. You have to pay for it. And that's, I mostly just pay for paper bags at this point. They hate me too.

Cause I never bring my own bag. I'm a fucking badass. I pay that 10 cents for that bag. They hate you too because I never bring my own bag. I'm a fucking badass. I pay that 10 cents for that bag. They hate you for that? You see it in their eyes? Yeah, you can see it. The judgment. The horrible judgment.

I need those paper bags. I use the paper bags. I know. I put my recycling in them. Yeah, that's also how I light the fire when I use my grill. I stuff the paper bag underneath the little charcoal chimney. That's what I use. Yeah.

Well, they'd hate you for that. Oh, fuck them. Short's what I use. Yeah. Well, they'd hate you for that. Oh, fuck them. Short-sighted bitches. Yeah. Anyway, I just think the earth, I don't know. I don't know. I think 100 years, it'd be hard for me to believe that things could still be going on around here.

Well, 100 years ago, you'd be amazed at what progress has taken place socially. You'd be amazed. I mean, think about that. Think about 1865 was the last time slavery was illegal, right? Think of that. That's not a long time ago at all. No, it's not that much time. I think that a thousand years from now, who the fuck knows what kind of technological capabilities we're going to have as far as our ability to not just not create waste, but to use up all the waste that we have created and use it in a positive way. Just because you burn gasoline, it creates pollution. It doesn't mean that's the only way

you can get energy. And just because pollution is in the air, carbon dioxide is hitting record levels. It doesn't mean that can't be maintained or regulated. I think there's got to be a way that people can figure out how to live sustainably. If it's possible to live sustainably in a small community, it's possible to live sustainably globally. So when you do it for yourself, like when you hunt for your meat, and you were telling me you have chickens before, you when you do all that stuff do you feel that you're doing it for yourself or you're doing it for your community or is it 50 50 zero i'm being totally honest zero for my community zero for the earth i'm just thinking what's the best way this is just my my intent going in i understand that it's better for the earth but my intent going in, I understand that it's better for the earth, but my intent going in is like, I don't want to rely on other people for my food. I don't want to rely on some farmer to not shove

antibiotics and hormones into food. I want to be able to eat clean, healthy food. Also ethically, I don't want to be a part of the factory farming system. I think when I watch these YouTube videos, factory farming system. I think when I watch these YouTube videos, these PETA videos on how they raise pigs and cows and it's, it's, it's fucking evil. I'd rather shoot a wild pig. I'd rather, I'd rather eat moose. You know, I think it's better for you too. The protein wise, the protein content of elk and moose is far higher than the protein content of beef. It's better for you. You can eat smaller portions. You get more out of it. I just For me it gives me a better feeling I know where everything came from when I eat a steak that I cut from an elk myself That is it's such a different feeling than when you go to the supermarket and you get something of ambiguous

Origins and plastic wrapped container and you just take it home you cut open the plastic and you slap it on the grill and i'm out here grilling like a man so you know at trader joe's that when you get just chopped meat from trader joe's it comes from four different countries they have four countries of origin on it for beef for beef go right now countries really yeah you could go maybe we can google it uh that it's coming from you know united it's something like the united states Countries? Really? burger from Trader Joe's. It came from four countries. I'm not making this up. I believe you. I didn't think, I wouldn't think you were making it up,

but I shouldn't say I'm surprised because if it's cheaper to do it that way, that's how they're going to do it. And Trader Joe's is known for having, you know, fairly inexpensive food. I shouldn't say cheap cause it's all good, but like, um, whole foods.

One of the things that I like about whole foods, people say whole foods is expensive. It is expensive. It is expensive. It is expensive. But they'll show you like the farm where the beef is being grown and you can choose how you want it. Like you can choose, like I did a Bourdain's show the other day. We're hunting pheasants in Montana for an upcoming episode and we were talking about steak. And he was like, you know what?

Everybody says, oh, you have to have grass fed, grass fed. He goes, I like a fatty steak. He goes, steak that's uh that eats corn i think i think it tastes better in a lot of ways but they give you options right they give you that like cured system shows you exactly where the meat is coming from how it's there's a fucking photo of the farm like they show you the farm where these things are being raised in and it's more expensive to eat sustainable food It is it's more expensive these hunts that I go on doesn't cheap, you know, and it's the effort is way more I mean if I if I shoot an elk It's gonna take me

Five or six days to put it all together to get one and then you have to process the meat and carry it and freeze it And do you do all of that or do you have people? I assume you have somebody helping you do some of that stuff. On some of them, I've done all of it. And on other ones, if I'm traveling, I'm flying, what I can do is do a lot of it and then bring the remaining pieces. I'll quarter it and bring the quarters to a meat processor and ask them to turn it into steaks or turn it into sausage or have things like that done. But the big cuts, like the back straps and the tenderloins and stuff like that, I do all that myself, the heart and the liver. I cut all that stuff out myself and then I bring it with me. I freeze it.

You know, if you want to see how crazy the food system is, also you could check, you know, there's so many documentaries on this, but the amount of laws that we have that protect the factory farming from simple things like having cameras in where the chickens are illegal the things that purdue is getting away with i always think purdue to me is like the the the worst of the worst because if you watch their commercials and this goes to what we're talking about with the with the drugs and the happy people during the day and then they're having diarrhea and killing each other whatever like the the the purdue commercials you got this guy come out,

he's hanging out with chickens. You know, he's talking to them, oh, there's Bernadette. Do they still have those commercials? Yeah, they still do all that stupid shit. Or sometimes it's a cartoon and he walks in, good morning. What he doesn't say is that he just, he's about, you know, it's like a Holocaust going on in there. He's killing all the chickens and he's going to kill them.

But we have somehow, like, that's how marketing is so crazy. We don't let cameras in to watch them rip the beaks off and burn the feathers off. Not only do we not let them in, it's illegal. So think about that. You can get arrested. What does that have to do? Why would the government, why would our government that's supposed to have our best interests at heart, right?

I guess that's what government's supposed to have. Why would they pass that kind of law? Right. Well, there's a lot of money to be made. Exactly. If you want to go to General Motors and you want to film them putting together a Camaro, of course.

Yeah. No problem. They love it. Yeah. Take down a tour. Yeah. This is how we do it. Why?

Because no fucking babies are getting crushed while they're making Camaros. Right. But if you want to go to a pig farm and film it, you can go to jail. Like these are new laws that have been passed because of whistleblowers. And those laws are evil. That's evil. I mean, that should be transparent.

A hundred percent. You should be able to know exactly where your food is coming from. There's only one way to do that. Yeah. I mean, we've done so many things between feeding these animals all sorts of shit that they shouldn't be eating. Have you ever drove up? I think it's a five if you're driving up towards like San Francisco, you pass Harris Ranch. So Harris Ranch, I think if I'm not mistaken, it's the largest meat producer in the United States or the largest meat producing ranch in the United States. And when you pass it, they call it cowschwitz. I mean, that's how there is so much. It stinks of death. I mean, pure death. Right. You smell that for a

good mile or two. You can see it in the air. You see these dirty animals that can barely move. I mean, I love meat. On my Twitter from last night, I had grass fed steaks cooked on a Himalayan salt plate. I love meat. Right. But after that, I was like, Jesus, like this is serious. That's that's when I got on at least doing the grass fed free range thing. Well, this is like I can't be part of this, but I know it's about money. Well, it's not just about money. It's about volume. Like when you have a community of 20 million people like Los Angeles and none of them are growing their own food Yeah, they're gonna need food and where's that food gonna come from?

It's gonna come from somebody else that grows that food and well how they're gonna grow that food They're gonna grow that food in the most cost-effective and efficient way possible which means stuff these fucking animals into these cages unless you demand something different and well If you do demand something different you're gonna have a higher price because then these companies aren't gonna be making much money yeah so they're gonna have to charge more money for the meat and then people can't afford it and then it becomes a problem but if you want to be able to go to In-N-Out burger or the in now is not a good example because it takes a little time but like Jack in the Box pull in get a ground-up beef

sandwich within 30 seconds yeah like there's only one way to do that you know you got to do it with a massive factory. You have to be churning these fuckers out, hanging them by their ankles and putting piston, you know, through their brain every 30 seconds. I mean, that's got to be chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk. You got to be constantly whacking them out because there's so many people that are hungry. Yeah. How do you think we get people to wake up on this?

Because we do. It's almost impossible. We cover it on my show sometimes. It's one of the things that I bring on Kara to talk about our food sources and the way that these, you know, you were eating sick animals and then we wonder why we're sick. Like it's all, of course, it's all connected. You open up a thing of meat and it's gray. Why is it gray? Why would you put that in your old? Yeah. Why would you put that in your body? But this is one of those things. It's like our the level of our discourse in America and the level of the nonsense on cable news and they can keep us distracted with Kim Davis issues and they can keep us distracted just with all of this nonsense. And I don't think it's necessarily like some big conspiracy of keeping us distracted as much as it's what we are as humans is this endless distraction. There's is this endless distraction.

There's just this endless distraction and you got to pilfer some truth out of it. You got to pilfer some way to find something that works for you. So I don't know that they can ever fix it because we're just in it. Well, I don't even know if it's an endless distraction. I think that life has too many variables. It's almost impossible to consider all the variables. Are you going to build your own shelter? Are you going to figure build your own shelter? Are you gonna figure out your own electricity? You're gonna run your own wires. Are you gonna fix your own washing machine? You're gonna build your own washing machine, you know, what are you gonna get it?

We're gonna get the parts how you gonna fucking forge the metal It's like there's so many things involved with living a comfortable healthy life in 2015 in the city that I mean Are you gonna be responsible for all aspects? Is it just going to be food sourcing? What about sewage? What about waste disposal? What are you going to do about all that stuff? Are you going to look into that,

or are you just going to flush your shit down the toilet and hope the guy at the other end knows what to do? That's essentially what it boils down to, this super complicated civilization that has been created. You could say we've created, but we're riding on the momentum of the people that came before us. And those people that came before us oftentimes didn't know what the fuck they were doing, didn't plan for the future, certainly didn't think that.

I mean, when I was a kid, okay, in the 1970s, there was like 100 million less people in this country. Just think about that. Think about the numbers between like 1975 and 2015. There's more than, I think it's more than 100 million more people just in this country alone. Yeah, I mean the baby boomers had all those kids. It's insane.

And then there's India, it's an exploding population. China, a massive population to the point where they're trying to limit the amount of babies that people have. I mean, we live in a very, very strange time in that people are awakening to all the problems that have been created by this massive amount of people in this incredible need for resources. hours a day plus commuting, plus hobbies, plus sexual needs and entertainment needs and friendships and every pull and push and, oh, well, you've got to have civic responsibility. Guess what, Dave Rubin? We need you for jury duty. You can't catch up. You can't catch up.

And we operate on this fucking constant momentum with very little quiet time. Yeah. And that's one of the things that I love. Goes to this thing. That's what I love the most about the sensory deprivation tank is that I get that quiet time that you don't get. I get time for reflection. How often are you doing it? Well, I have it in my house.

Oh, man. So I do it all the time. Wow, that is really cool. Yeah. I think everyone should do it just to try it, just to feel what it's like to just be alone with your thoughts Because the only time you're actually alone with your thoughts cuz you know, your body isn't even registering Is there a lock on that thing? No, I would be freaking out the entire time. No Well, I know it doesn't make sense. But like would there be some reason that it could lock? No. Yeah, I was not in a latch There's not even a latch. No, it's not a door handle or anything.

It just pushes open and pushes closed. And how long do you go in there for? As long as I want. Usually at least an hour, usually. Really? But sometimes two hours. I know for the first like 20 minutes of being in there, I'd be like, is this thing locked? Did I get locked?

Like it would be a lot. Even if I was alone, you know what I mean? I would just be fearing. That's funny. Yeah. You'd get used to it. It's like everything else. It's not scary at all. It's relaxing. What does one of those run mean? I would just be fearing. That's funny. Yeah. You'd get used to it. It's like everything else. It's not scary at all.

It's relaxing. What does one of those run you? It's expensive. All right. You can get a cheap one for like, well, I think there's a company called Zen Float that makes a small personal one that Duncan has in his house. And I think that one is still fairly expensive, but it's like 1500 bucks. I got the top of the line, mama jama float lab version which is

like 30 grand Wow yeah they're really expensive but mine is seven feet tall and nine feet wide and it looks like a meat locker it's like it looks like a gigantic freezer that you step into but it's perfect it's good I'd like to see the compound that you live on I feel like there's a lot of cool between the chickens and the deprivation yeah like a lot and there's elk lot of cool, between the chickens and the deprivation. Yeah, like a lot. And there's elk. I have an archery range. Yeah? Yeah, I have a full archery range. It goes up to 100 yards in my yard.

Rubber pigs and rubber elk and rubber deers. I have an Ikea couch outside. Did you build it yourself? It's an L. Did you hire someone? No, no, I built it. I don't want to brag, but it's an L. It's pretty sweet.

I was reading this thing that they were talking about. People, they experience more satisfaction in the ownership of things like Ikea. Because even though it's not like good furniture, it's not like the best furniture, the fact that they put it together themselves gives them a sense of satisfaction that I think we're kind of missing in part of our culture. Like someone who built their own house and built their own furniture and they sit in their own house, their own furniture, probably gets like a deep feeling of satisfaction about that.

Well, I can tell you as someone that has almost all Ikea, you know, it's funny. I started, I'm 39. I started standup right when I got out of college, 98. Had radio shows. It's been a long, a long journey. I finally, for the first time in this past, it's really in the past six months and only in the last couple months, that I really feel like I'm sort of on the other side for the first time. And I know that that feeling never goes away and I probably just jinxed it horribly. The other side in what way?

Well, the other side meaning like, I feel like I'm here somewhere. Like I'm in this. You've got a career. Yeah, like I really have something and know what I'm saying and know what I'm doing and being rewarded for it financially you know, financially and personally and by my audience and stuff.

But I'm not rolling in dough by any stretch. I'm not going to make six figures. But I'm doing good, right? You're not scared. I'm not, yeah. But the fear, it's always there. You know, the fear factor, so to speak. I think it probably never leaves the most...

I have a friend of mine who's on a huge sitcom. She's making a boatload of money and she talks to me about it all the time. She's like, it could be gone tomorrow. And then what? And then what am I left with? So I have some money now, but like, you know, what am I left with?

But I do aspire. My house is pretty much 90% Ikea. Like I want to get to- A hundred? No, I want to get to the point when there's, no, I want to get to 10% Ikea. You know what I mean? Like my couch is Ikea.

My bed is Ikea. My futon's Ikea. The shit in my kitchen is Ikea. Like it's, that would be to me success. Like let's just designer furniture. Well, because the Ikea couch more than anything is,

is painful. Not good. It's not good. No, that might be why my neck hurts. It's not because of my iPad. Could be that as well. Yeah. But that, more than anything, is painful. Not good? It's not good. That might be why my neck hurts. It's not because of my iPad. Could be that as well. Yeah.

But, you know, like, I'm joking, but also, like, there's a lot of truth in that. Like, that I feel like it sort of started working, and I was just looking around my place the other day, like, maybe the next phase will be, like, a little bit more something. Well, I feel like it's a rabbit hole you have you have to be really careful whether you step in because it will suck your time up yeah you know like this this hunting thing sucked my time up if i went into the manufacturing my own furniture thing yeah like cutting my own wood and milling it and so and unfortunately i have friends that are professional woodworkers you know i i know like that it is possible to learn all that stuff and

then build furniture you could do it but then you'd have to say okay well am i gonna weave my own cloth to cover this furniture right are you churning your own butter i mean what are we talking am i gonna use the elk that i kill for the leather that covers the couch and i'm gonna have to kill quite a few animals to populate my house the whole thing would be a bloodbath it's a lot it's a lot of work yeah it's a lot of work. Yeah. It's a lot of work. Or am I going to get one of them crazy Indian weaves, you know, where you have the yarn,

you pull it through, and you push it down and make your own cloth. Yeah. It's a lot of fucking work. Do you feel like you're there? What do you mean? That place, that place on the other side, where you've sort of built what you wanted to build, and your life, and your work, and all of it is sort of lined up? Do you feel like you're there? No. I don't think., I don't think, I don't think like that. Yeah. I don't think like that. I don't worry. I don't

worry about money. Yeah. I don't worry about money, but, um, I worry about work in, in that I want to make sure that everything I'm doing is good, whether it's podcasts or whether it's standup or whether it's doing my commentary. I always want to make sure that I'm not doing bad stuff and that if I have done something that's not that good, I make sure that that doesn't happen ever again. Or that if it does happen again, I learn from that one too and it gets better even there. So there's that. It's not like, shit, I got to pay my bills. But I do remember that feeling bad. And I also remember the moment that that went away how free it was

like uh I got a development deal when I was like um I don't know how many years in the economy but it's like 93 and I got a big check from Disney of all people and uh all of a sudden I didn't have to worry about how I was paying my rent all of a sudden for at least the next year or so or a couple years it was paid and there was like this silence like this weight just literally a physical weight felt like it lifted off my shoulders and then i thought about it and i said man you know what some people never get to that place they live their life from cradle to the grave constantly under the pressure of bills check to check and that that freedom of not worrying about your bills is massive and people trip themselves up by putting themselves in debt and by getting

in over their head giving themselves a bunch of shit that they don't need then they have to pay for it or they buy it on credit then they have to fucking don't worry i'll figure out a way and that that pressure is overwhelming for people. And when that pressure went away, it was replaced by the pressure to try to do good stuff, to try to do things that I can be proud of, to try to do things where- But weren't you doing that already? Yeah, but I was trying to do it and I was worried about making money at the same time. And as soon as the worry about making money kind of goes away, then you're left with a pure sense of why you're doing it. So isn't that, for all the things that now we put out there, podcast, video, audio, all that stuff,

owning your brand, all the things that you do. I hate that expression. I know, I hate it too. Own your brand. You're doing amazing things with your brand. When people say that, I want to run from them. Yeah. How do you manage your brand?

Somebody asked me to do a seminar on that really recently well you're not worried about money so i guess you didn't have to pretty good i don't think you make much money in those seminars seminars pay you know who gets money the people that run the seminar yeah they get money they're doing they're the pimps i'm sorry yeah no uh but that that's the beauty of all this stuff so you you built this whole thing and then you're free you answer to yourself yeah you know and it's really and this is a very unique time for people like us because finally all of this exists so that we can control our destiny yeah you know and i'm attached to a network or has

been really good to me as you said at the beginning they let me do whatever i want i mean literally they sat me down the day before the show started an executive who i had never met in person before said he's like i have one thing to say to you make the show you want to make not the show started, an executive who I had never met in person before said, he's like, I have one thing to say to you. Make the show you want to make, not the show you think we want you to make. What is your show on? What is it on now? So we're on Aura TV.

What is that? Which is Larry King's digital network. Larry King has his own digital network? Larry King. It's with partners with Carlos Slim. Who's that? Carlos Slim. Slim Jim?

No, he's even richer than that guy. No way. They say he's either the richest or second richest man in the world. He's a Mexican telecom billionaire. He partly owns the New York Times now and a bunch of other stuff. Yeah. So they're part digital network and part production company. So William Shatner has a show there.

Jesse Ventura has a show. Do they pay well? I mean, as I said, I'm not making six figures. I don't like pauses. I'm not making six figures. I'm not making six figures But they let me do it. I'm Larry King's almost dying. Come on. Come in here. Oh, oh Yes, the hounds. Yeah, he's been very good to me. You know, whatever I'll tell you what saying I want to hear better numbers Believe me. I want to hear better numbers, too

But actually this is the first deal that I ever had my agent Closed for me and because i'd always done even my serious xm deals i did myself and my podcast deals i'd always done everything and when my agent did this it was i didn't realize how hard it was going to be for me to let go and be like oh i'm supposed to trust you to actually do a deal and that was really hard for me to actually say, you know, but that's how you mature in this thing. Well, you got to have a good agent.

I told you my issue that I had with the agent when the Mencia thing went down, how horrible that was. But I've had the same manager scrub. I was just a kid in my early 20s, didn't know what the fuck I was doing, but I was able to since I was an open miker. Wow. That's where I got really lucky.

My manager, he found me in Boston when I was making people laugh, and he saw something that he thought, and we worked together ever since. He's one of my best friends. He's a great friend. Yeah. But a manager could be, I think people are always confused, sort of the manager-agent thing. A manager really is sort of like

In a lot of respects should be your friend and your guru Yeah, you're sort of you know helping you down that road the agent is getting you gigs, but sometimes they're not I mean I have friends that have just really fucked up relationships with their managers And yeah, and when you're not doing well the manager can be a real cunt and hard to get on the fiends codependent relationship Wait, you're saying the people in this town can be fair weather friends? I'm saying exactly that. I can't believe it. Listen, we're almost out of time. But really, before we leave, I have to talk to you about one thing that you told me that I think is,

and when you do start doing well, then they're your buddy. It's an incestuous, weird, fucking very strange codependent relationship. Wait, you're saying the people in this town can be fair weather friends? I'm saying exactly that. I can't believe it. codependent relationship to wait you're saying the people in this town can be fair-weather friends listen we're almost out of time but i really before we leave i have to talk to you about one thing that you told me that i think is incredibly fascinating you came out literally the to someone for the very first time the day before september 11th the night it was it was about midnight of september 11th so meaning september it was about midnight of September 11th, so meaning September 10th,

it had just rolled into September 11th. The first person I ever came out to, a brilliant comic who you've never heard of and I don't even know what happened to him, this guy Mike Singer was one of the best comics that I ever knew. We worked for years together. This guy was wickedly funny.

I think he lives in Columbia now or something, not doing stand-up. Anyway, he was gay. And he was, so I, in a way, I was ahead of my time in terms of being out as a comic that doesn't necessarily play into every stereotype and all that. This guy was really ahead of it because he was 15 years older than me and had done it already. Anyway, we were in the Times Square subway. I was going back. I lived on the upper East at the time. I was walking to the shuttle thing to go to get on the East side. And I was just a fucking complete mess.

It's incredibly hard to live one life, right? Like to live one life on this planet is a hard thing. Try living two at the same time. And that's what I was doing because I had my life that everyone knew. And then I had this secret life where I was out, you know, hooking up, and I was lying to people constantly, even though I never intended to lie. I would be somewhere, and I'd bump into a friend, and I'd be with a guy, a gay person,

and I could just, oh, that's my cousin. Like, it just, it was incredible. I never, really, I mean this, I never intended to lie to people, or it just became this really horrible game of cat and mouse. And I was depressed and I was smoking a pot and all that shit anyway. And then when it when it really. So, as I said earlier, you know, that that it was the fuel for good comedy for a long time. And then eventually it just started sputtering. It was like I wasn't happy. I wasn't full.

I wasn't couldn't bring those things to the stage anymore and just my life was a fucking disaster anyway uh about midnight just eight hours before the first plane hit i'm in this time square subway station with my friend i told him i was gay i don't think he realized even though this guy knew me for years i don't think he realized that i don't think i oh, you're the first person I'm telling or something like that. Like I just said it. And we just we talked for two or three minutes and he's like, all right, I'll talk to you later this week or something. And I go home and I woke up and I turn on the TV and America's under attack. And I kid you not, like I was smoking a lot of time.

I was not mentally right. Like I wasn't. I remember probably a few weeks before that I was walking to the subway and by living two lives, I felt, I felt like a crazy person. It's hard to describe. The only way I could describe it was I remember walking down second Avenue and it looked like all the buildings were shaking. Like I was, I felt centered, like I was okay, but literally it felt like the world

was being ripped apart. That was like the, the level of disconnect I had with reality at that point. Like, you know what I mean? Like if you can't express your love properly, if you can't, you know, that's why we started this whole thing talking about all these guys that are jacked and working out all the time and whatever. It's like, that's why I said it's very sad to me because these are people who could not express a very human thing in a proper way. So they end up acting out at 45 in a way that they should have acted when they were 15. Or they're partying and having a great time and you're a hater. Milo Yiannopoulos. What do you have against meth?

Well, Milo, who you had on a couple of ago, and I had him on the day or two after. I mean, we argued about that. Me as the liberal, the gay married liberal, who's for that traditional thing, and him as the off-the-wall British gay conservative who's against gay marriage because he wants to talk about drugs and partying and sex and whatever. So that's why I love talking to him. In all honesty, and I really enjoy talking to Milo, he's trolling in so many different ways simultaneously. he's winking at you the entire time. Exactly.

That's the audience. I think the audience is aware of it. And if he was sitting right here, he wouldn't. Most of the audience isn't aware of it. I don't think. Well, these people are idiots.

But anyway, so you, so I woke up and I, I kid you not, Joe, I kid you not. I thought it had something to do with me. I thought we were like to do with me.

I thought we were like the world was attacked or we were under attack because that I finally expressed this thing that I had the secret that I had had. That it's so bad that being out caused the world to collapse. Yeah, I know that even saying that now, I've always told this publicly, maybe twice, like it sounds completely fucking insane. And it's that was and it is insane. like that's where my head was at and and interestingly after that the way I dealt with coming out was I would tell someone and then I would get this little burst of feeling better I would suddenly because you I was like constricting my heart and when I would tell someone it would it would open up a little and I'd feel better and I could I really could feel like I could breathe better like really felt better and then I would tell someone, it would open up a little and I'd feel better. And I really could feel like I could breathe better, like really felt better. And then I would wait until that pressure would start building again.

Sometimes I would wait months and then I would tell someone. And then I would do this over the course of like two years. And then eventually I realized, I was like, you know, every time I tell somebody this thing that I think is horrible and they're pretty much okay and I feel better, I was like, I got to end this. It's time to end this now. And that's basically when I told the remaining people and that was it.

It's a weird secret because the people that do care, that don't like it, they're not worth knowing. And nobody, literally nobody. Nobody that I told. You know, my dad struggled for a little bit or, you know, whatever, this and that. The thing that mostly people got was that nobody believed I was gay. That was like mate but you play basketball you know what i mean you

play basketball like you know like that so nobody could believe like they just well you don't seem gay like i don't like to dance i don't you know gays dancing that's hilarious i learned my dancing from cosby like that's my move you know like So like, so all of that, like it did. So that was the main thing. Everyone was just sideswiped. So a lot of times people will say to me, you know, you're, you act straight or you're straight acting or something, which in the gay community is thought of as like this great thing. You know, there, if you're straight acting, you're masculine, it's really great. But I don't, I don't take it that way. Cause every time someone says it to me, it makes me feel like a freak. You know what I mean?

Like, why am I? Yeah. Because I am who I am. like a freak. You know what I mean? Really? Yeah, because I am who I am. This is it. You know what I mean? I had gay sex last night after I had that grass-fed beef. So I'm gay. I'm married to a guy. That sounds like a gay person. That's a pretty gay thing.

You're married to a guy. I would say you're gay. Yeah, it's pretty gay. That's what I realized. I was like, oh, I'm marrying this dude. I guess I'm gay. But you know what I mean? That's what I realized. I was like, oh, I'm marrying this dude. Like, I guess I'm gay. But you know what I mean? That's what you realized.

I was like, holy shit. Like, I guess, well, you know. No turning back now. Yeah. It was a phase. I was experimenting. Yeah, this is a long phase. I'm really like, you know, dragging out this phase thing.

But I realized that if I felt better when I told people that there had to be some value in that in a way that I couldn't understand things. But to the straight acting, like, so I don't, it means nothing to me. When I meet guys that are completely flaming or if I meet guys that are, that you'd have no idea, like, I like people based on their values and their sense of humor and like shit like that. I never. As to all people that matter. As, as, yeah. Like shit like that. I never.

As do all people that matter. Yeah. And you know what? That's sort of a great way to bring this all around because that gets away from judging people on what you're supposed to think about them and all that social justice warrior and regressive bullshit versus judging people on the content of their character. And also it gets back to what we were saying earlier that it's like it's just being aware socially. Being a good person to communicate with versus being socially retarded and just looking for those ben affleck brownie moments yeah let me toss in one other thing that sort of ties into this really nicely so one one time when i was on uh the young turks uh and i'm not going to mention names here but i was on and they were showing a clip from fox news and they were talking

about how the black host that he was such a token black guy he was such a token black guy. He was such a token black guy. And I actually know the guy. It's this guy, David Webb, who I used to work with at Sirius XM. I'm pretty good friends with him. I had dinner with him last week. He is a black conservative. He is a conservative. I know him.

I know what this guy believes. He spends hours on the air every day professing his beliefs. And that was another. This happened a little bit after that whole Sam Harris thing, but that was another moment when I realized how perverse this whole regressive thing is that here you have people on the left that are supposed to be about ideas, looking at the color of that guy's skin and saying, well, because you don't believe what I think you're supposed to believe as a black person, you're a token black guy. You know, we've all

done that. You know, like when they showed like a Republican convention and there's one black guy plotting, you know, like, oh, there's the token black guy. But I realized that's actually racism. Like that was, that was really a seminal moment for me that really changed my thinking. Cause I was like, this is crazy. I know this person personally, this is a friend of mine. And I know he believes he's not doing this cause he's a token buy this is this is what he believes and you as the on the left are pointing at this guy and saying you're different than what I think you're supposed to be black guy so you must be a token or you're an uncle Tom or a sellout or something and also all of this when you the gay stuff the social justice or either the regressive stuff like judge people based on what they say, what they say and what they believe.

Nothing else. That's it. That's it. Wrap it up. Dave Rubin, thank you very much, man. I'm glad we got together. I've never had to pee as badly as I do right this second. Go run.

I'll wrap this up. If I had peed, I could have... We'll just keep going. You would have been cool with it. No, we'll just talk. Yeah, it's fine. People have done it a bunch of times. Thanks, brother.

This was seriously... Thank you. My pleasure. Really, this been cool with it. We just talk. Yeah, it's fine. People have done it a bunch of times. Thanks, brother. This was seriously. How do people get your show? Thank you. My pleasure. Really, this was beyond a pleasure. How do people listen to your show? How do they get a hold of it? YouTube slash Rubin Report or a.tv slash Rubin Report, Rubin Report on Twitter.

My branding. I told you, the branding. Keep that brand alive. Thanks, brother. All right, thanks, brother. Yeah. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we'll be back soon. See you.

See you. Have a lovely life. Kiss your friends. Bye-bye. Wait.