Episode 375: Dave Rubin: Unfiltered Takes on Biden, Trump, Tequila, and How Your Vote Affects Your Sex Life

Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins.

You're listening to Habits and Hustle, Greg.

So first of all, before we start this podcast, well, actually, that's not true.

We start this podcast on the right foot by taking these shots.

They're by magic mind and they're very, very good for your focus, productivity, and being super alert.

And I'm not a drinker.

Are you a drinker?

I like tequila.

Do we count that as drinking?

Well, tequila is actually alcohol.

So yes, it is actually considered drinking.

It's agave.

It's 100% blue agave.

That's true.

Yeah.

Well, this is not tequila or agave.

This is a healthy.

You got some decent tequila in there.

You may not be drinking it, but I saw what's going on in your little liquor cabinet over there.

You want to hear the funniest thing before we take these shots is there's so much alcohol in this house.

You would think that I was like an alcoholic for 30 years and my husband.

Neither one of us even like drink alcohol, but people keep on bringing us that tequila.

What's it called?

That's it.

Pasazul.

Yeah,

I have so much of it.

I just, I'm like basically giving it away by the bot class.

Pasazul is the gateway tequila.

You give that to anyone that drinks anything else.

I've done this a million times because, you know, I have a lot of conservative friends that only drink whiskey and they think if you don't only drink whiskey or bourbon, somehow you're gay or weird.

So I've given them tequila and that's the thing that then opens up a whole wider world to them.

Really?

Yeah.

That bottle particularly.

That particular bottle.

Pasazul Reposado, yeah.

Which actually, although I do love it, is not the best tequila out there.

Okay, who is it?

It's not made the best way.

There's additives, et cetera.

I'm actually making a tequila.

It's coming out in September.

Are you serious?

Yeah.

That's so funny.

So first of all, I used to drink, I mean, I'm not, I'm hardly an expert in this, but what's that one that Gary, George Clooney and Casamigos, which also is not the best tequila by far, but you put the name George Clooney on the bottle and you can sell the company for $500 million.

100%.

And it's not terrible.

I'm not saying it was at $7.50.

Yeah.

I was only off by $250.

Yeah, just a little.

But he, like Randy, Randy Gerber, him, and a bunch, I think a couple other people, of course, I don't know who else, but that was, everyone thought that that was a premium

product because of George Clooney, but it was probably not even a premium product.

It's not really premium in any way.

It's perfectly fine.

It's not like Patron.

What's better?

Well, there's many levels of Patron.

It depends on each one.

Silver.

The Casa Migos Mez Scal, I actually think is pretty decent.

Blanco is just Blanco.

You really can't screw it up.

But Reposado, that's what I'm making, which is age three months, is a little more complex to make and then a nejo which is a year or there's super nejos there are extra a nejos that are a year plus they're sort of more easy to make because you're really just aging them for a long time so i like reposados because it's like right in between both and i don't think the casamigos reposado is particularly good i love this you actually you like know what you're talking about i do know what i'm talking about okay you could probably put a little of this in my tequila which i can't tell you the name yet it's not public yet oh you're going to find that we're going to announce it i think on september 3rd really yeah hopefully you sell it for a billion dollars like all these other companies.

We'll see.

It's a passion project at the moment.

So, we'll see.

I love that.

Okay, so wait, so let's just do this shot.

I want to know more.

Okay, so what we do here, we shake it.

Does it explode on me in any way?

It might.

And you're wearing a really nice white shirt.

White shirt.

I'm going to see Bill Maher later.

You know, Bill Maher outfit I got on.

Bill Maher, if he shows up all messy, you can blame me.

Okay.

Cheers.

Cheers.

And then we just.

One shot.

Just one shot.

One shot.

Or two if you're me.

But that's pretty good.

Oh, yeah, that's good.

It's amazing.

Is there melon melon in there?

What is that at the end?

It's ashwagandha.

It's a lot of adaptogens.

It's like a new tropic.

It's like a new tropic.

But what is that sweetness right at the end?

I don't know.

Read it because I'm blind right now.

I couldn't see.

I literally just got at 48.

I got glasses like three months ago for the first time in my life.

All of us are.

Is there writing on this?

I don't know.

Isn't that funny?

I had perfect vision until about six months ago.

Yeah, me too.

Me too.

Perfect vision my entire life.

Me too.

How old are you?

Same age as you.

We're both 48.

We both got glasses about six months ago.

Is that crazy?

Weird.

I know.

It's a little strange, isn't it?

And I can't read one ingredient on this.

Well, I see it says it's subtly sweet.

So it does agree with me.

Well, what does it say?

God bless you.

You got 12 magical ingredients.

How are you reading this?

I see

matcha green tea.

I see vanilla.

I think I see vanilla.

You know what I do?

This is what I do, Dave.

I'm going to show you a chart.

Anyone who's listening to this.

No, I can't be part of this.

I'd rather, I would literally rather drive off a ditch than turn on the camera

like flashlight at a restaurant.

Yeah.

I know, but this is what you have to to do.

I take a picture of it and then I read the picture.

Organic agave, fashion fruit.

Taking a picture.

Yeah, I take a picture of the thing and then I enlarge it so I can see the world.

Yeah, that's like a bridge too far.

That's why I got the glasses because I was at, I think I was at Hillstone in Miami, which is lit kind of dimly.

Yeah, I love Hillstone.

And I was just like, I know this menu and I still can't see it.

And then I was about to do the flashlight thing and I was like, no, I'm not in Del Boca Vista just yet.

Like, no, no, no no no no why won't you do the flashlight though no because it's just because then it's just it's a concession

next thing you know you have to move your table because it's a little too close to the window and then they have a problem with this or that it's too bright it's too

have you heard the the joke um the waiter walks up to a table full of jewish people by the way we can say this because we're jewish people yes and says it's is anything okay

is anything okay but the funny thing is i think it's really kind of sad because I cannot concede to it either.

Like, even though I have these readers, I will not bring them anywhere.

I'll not barely ever wear them.

I'd rather walk around blind walking into things.

Here, you want to see my glasses?

I'll put my glasses on for a moment.

You can see if you can judge whether you think they're okay or not.

See, you look good in the glasses.

What do you think?

Yeah.

Yeah, who makes those?

Do I look smarter?

I can't say anything.

You look really good.

Because then other people are going to buy them.

You don't want to be unique.

I'll tell you, I'll tell you later.

Okay, I think they're Warby Parker.

They're not Warby Parker.

No, no.

Are Are they Caddis?

That's all I want to know.

No, they're not.

You could try.

Nope.

Nope.

That's it.

Can't do it anymore.

And you see when I took them off, that it looked like I was like, really, like.

Yeah, well, you look very distinguished with them.

That's quite a thought that you're having.

Yeah, I don't.

Don't tell me more.

I'll tell you much more without the glasses, actually.

But isn't that weird?

Like, what happens when you turn a certain age where you then become blind?

I don't get it.

The fact that we both made it to 48 without doing that, from what I understand, is like very, very

big deal, impressive.

But I, you know, now it's like, I only need them for that.

It's really just for reading right in front of me.

And

also, I had a running joke on my show for years.

We had a fake pair of Warby Parker thick rim glasses because my, because the joke was that newscasters, they all do it.

Anderson Cooper, when he wants you to think something is important, puts them on.

Or when he's emotional, he takes them off.

And they literally they all do it.

Don Lemon did it.

It's so true.

All of them do it.

So we had this running joke where I was doing it all the time.

So now I feel even on my show when I need to read something, I can't put the glasses on because then I'm basically I've become what I always

mock.

Exactly.

That you always mocked.

So I just can't see anything.

It's fine.

Well, they write.

So you're blind like me.

Can you see me right now?

Yes.

No, no, no.

It's literally

from this to this.

And it's really only, it's only in a dark restaurant, really, except that this is printed.

It's extremely tiny.

I know.

It's a small bottle, small print.

You and I have the same, like, obviously, like, blind problem or whatever, like eye problem or eyesight problem.

It's the basic thing.

Like, it is like the girl at the place was like, this is the most basic, simple thing.

And most people have this in their 20s.

I know.

The problem is, like, it's a sign of being old, though, I do think.

So, well, I mean, everything is a sign of aging to some extent.

Like, you know, things start working a little less or move a little less or whatever.

But for the rest, I think we're both doing okay for 48.

No, not bad.

Do your friends look like my friends?

I mean, most of the people that I grew up with not looking so great.

You know, honestly, exactly.

I think in the grand scheme of things, I think I'm doing okay.

Yeah.

And you seem like you're doing okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, but the eyesight is just like a mental stuff, like a mental thing.

Yeah.

Okay.

Now, by the way, I didn't even say who's here.

This is Dave Rubin.

But I, there, there'll be like a proper intro.

Yes.

But this is Dave Rubin.

He is the guy behind the Rubin report.

And

you know what's interesting?

Why don't you give your bio?

Because it's a very interesting bio.

You had, you were a comedian, you're a political analyst or commentator.

You have a very zigzaggedy, interesting bio.

So why don't you tell everyone who you are?

I was born in Brooklyn in 1976.

We lived there for three years, moved to Long Island,

ended up going to SUNY Binghamton, State University of New York at Binghamton, which is now like a Hamas hotbed, unfortunately.

But back then, you just smoke pot and you made it through.

After four years, it was pretty great.

And then I started doing stand-up right after school.

And that was really, my friends were just funny.

Everyone was funny.

That was the language we spoke in.

We were funny.

We played basketball, video games, and smoke pot.

Like Like that was.

And I always thought somebody was going to be a comedian.

And then a week after college, I was like, I need a job.

I guess I'll go be a comedian.

And I was on stage at the New York Comedy Club.

It was, I think it was the end of May 1998.

And I did pretty well.

And then I was like, all right, I'll be a comedian.

And in my mind, I thought that meant like, I don't know, you work for a year or two and then you have like a, you make like a living off that, which in retrospect is completely insane, right?

I mean, guys work in clubs for years and years and years and barely make anything anything or actually lose money because of the time you have to invest to be in it.

Or nobody really wants to be a road comic.

And also back then, you know, 98, it's 26 years ago, which is also kind of nuts.

Like the world was very, very different.

It was way pre-iPhone.

It was kind of pre-internet in any way that we all remember the internet.

You know, guys weren't getting sitcoms anymore.

Like the whole idea of doing stand-up was like you do stand-up for a while.

Like from our day, it was you do stand-up for a while, you get on Johnny Carson, you have five minutes.

If he likes you, you sit with him and and then you get your show.

Like that's what happened to Tim Allen and Roseanne Barr and literally everybody, Jerry Seinfeld, everybody.

But by the time I started doing it, those shows were disappearing.

Like Friends was wrapping up at that point, Seinfeld was already over and reality TV was kicking in.

So then the best you could get really as a comic was to be a game show host or host of a reality TV show.

So the guys that were sort of the generation

ahead of me in the clubs, like Colin Quinn and that crew,

they were stuck in the clubs.

So my generation was like the first generation that like couldn't get out of the clubs anyway i'm telling you all that because then eventually i was like all right well this isn't i'm i'm a good comic but this isn't getting me anywhere i did road stuff but that that's just miserable you know you're in the middle of nowhere and it's horrible and you're barely paid and all that and then and then eventually i heard of this thing called podcasting there was a little more ability to do video online and that's kind of where i shifted more but i was always doing like political stuff and cultural commentary well i find sometimes that that some of the smartest people i know are comedians right stand-ups because you have to have a person, A, they have a great,

you're observational a lot, the ones who are good anyway, and they have a great perspective, and they have to understand current topical things, right?

And

be funny about it, right?

You have to look at the world in like a tilted way

and see reality.

And as Oscar Wilde said, if you're going to tell people the truth, you better be funny or they're going to kill you.

So it's like, that really is it, or comedy is tragedy plus time.

Like if you look at things, you see a darkness in the world, or at least the world the way it is.

And then if you can apply like some lens to that, that will allow people to see it and think a little bit.

I mean, that's what laughing is.

Laughing is like the natural reaction to thinking, actually, if done right.

Otherwise, it's pitchforks, you know?

Right, exactly.

But you said, so basically.

Can I drink this hydration water now, or do we have to wait for a certain point in the show?

Or because I am a little thirsty, but I don't want to.

It's hilarious.

You could drink whatever.

Yeah, okay.

I didn't know.

I didn't know if we were going to.

I didn't know if we have to cheers to this also, or

you're going to douse me in this or what.

This is life force water which is not it's just hydrogen it's hydrated or hydrogen water but no you can do whatever you want those this was kind of like a cutesy magic mic i've been drinking regular water like a sucker already i feel but you feel so much more hydrated now that you're drinking the hydrogen water it's like the capri sun of water is it is it's actually it it is in the capri sun type of packaging yeah wait so do you think of yourself then as a comedian or of a what do you consider yourself a political commentator do you think of yourself as a political commentator yeah i guess now i'm mostly a political

commentator and then when i but like you know when i'm on a book tour or i opened for jordan peterson for a year like i can still do stand-up in that way but it's more just like now open for jordan peterson for a year and a half we did uh about 120 shows in 20 countries for the first book for 12 rules for life yeah and that really changed that literally changed my life yeah Yeah.

So how did you get that?

How did that work?

Because he's not a comedian by any stretch, but he's a, he actually, when I went to U of T in Toronto, he was a professor there.

Oh, wow.

You went there.

Yeah.

And he, I'm a Canadian.

Yeah.

And he was a professor there.

Like he's, he's an academic, right?

I mean, that's what he is.

And he just became like a massive like household name.

Yeah.

Did you take any of his classes?

No, I didn't.

It's a shame because, you know, if you've seen any of those classes, some of those classes are online still.

Yeah, I know.

And if you watch, you can see, you can see the brilliance.

You can see the beginning of him.

It's the origin story.

But the way he's put it together now over the course of, you know, three plus decades is absolutely incredible.

But the way that that happened,

it was actually a joke.

The way that that happened was I had had Jordan on my show a couple of times.

And this is around 2017 or so.

And he came to my house.

My studio is in my house, in my garage in Sherman Oaks.

And I had him and Ben Shapiro on the show together.

And that night, first off, it was our most, we did a live show for about two and a half hours.

It was our most viewed show ever at that time.

The live stream was the most viewed, you know, concurrent views and all that stuff.

And it was also, if you are familiar with some of the stuff that was happening at that time, there was this thing called the IDW, or it was totally, they called it the so-called IDW.

It was sort of me and Rogan and Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peter, all these people that were like sort of podcasters, science people, intellectuals that were just having conversations that were not being had mainstream.

And this thing was really blowing up.

And that night, it was in Los Angeles, and that night Jordan was going to do his first ever theater show.

They were just doing a test at the Orpheum downtown as to just to see if could could this clinical psychologist who talks about Peter Pan and all this other stuff, could he draw a crowd?

And what would he do for an hour and a half?

So the show ended.

And I said to Jordan, literally, he was walking out the door of my house.

And I was like, and it was kind of a joke.

I was like, hey, you know, if you want me to come tonight and I'll crack a couple of jokes about lobsters.

He was doing a lot of stuff about lobsters and why they sort of crawl to the top of the pot.

I was like, I'll crack a couple of jokes, you know, if you want, no, no problem.

And he's like, he's like, yeah, why don't you come down?

And I opened the show, about 10 minutes of silly jokes about Jordan and about me and whatever else was going on in the world and absolutely crushed it.

Jordan then did an hour and a half of his usual brilliance, which he had never really done in that forum before, you know, like a real theater situation.

And all the CAA guys were there.

There were like 10 guys there, all dressed CAA suits and that whole thing.

And they immediately after walked up to me and they were like, this was incredible.

We're putting them on tour.

You want to open for him?

Let's figure it out.

And

yeah.

And it all started right then and there.

Are you serious?

And then a month later, we were at the Beacon Theater in New York City, which was the theater that I always wanted to perform at my entire life because I lived on the Upper West when I was doing stand-up and I always used to walk by the beacon thinking, one day I'll perform here.

And that's where the tour kicked off.

Wow.

Wait, so how many people showed up at the Orpheus at that?

It was sold out.

So my guess it was about 3,000 people.

And then we did shows, you know, really ranging.

We did, it was all theaters.

Like it wasn't clubs.

It was theaters.

So I would say the smallest ones would be about 2,200.

And then the big ones were probably about 8,000 or ten thousand something like that and he's done bigger theaters since because he's way bigger now than he was even then so back i was going to say when did he like become like when did he become popular he became popular i can tell you exactly it was the fall of 2016 it was started bubbling up into the internet sphere around september october 2016 because if you remember there was a bill in canada yeah probably remember as a canadian yeah it was bill c16 about gender pronouns and potentially you could be put in jail or fined and all that and he was one of the first people talking about it.

And then once people started hearing him talk about it, then they started diving into some of his other stuff that he had online.

And then, of course, you know, just the way he speaks.

And then they started realizing, boy, this guy's not just some crazy person talking about gender pronouns.

He has a 30-year history as a psychology, clinical psychologist, and a professor and all this stuff.

And there's such a breadth of knowledge there.

And it's so cool, actually, every now and again on YouTube, like one of those videos will pop up from way back when.

Yeah.

And I'm like, man, first off, that I had anything to do with this adventure, like the little footnote that I am in his adventure, but also to see the way it has grown and grown and grown.

And the amount of people, trust me, we did over 100 shows, like the amount of people that I saw that he got off drugs, mended relationships with their parents, got into better marriages, resolved things with their children, like got better jobs, like whatever the thing, this man solved it night and night.

Again, it was incredible.

And people crying in the crowds.

And it's just really?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Because I was going to say, my next question was, what does he do on like what's his what is his not shtick is the wrong word but like what does he do on stage is it does he just just riff speak like what does he bring people on and try to solve their problems like what is the no so he he basically it's really fascinating actually and I they've taped a lot of them but but to be part of it was really incredible because he would basically the idea of the tour was that it was a book tour.

So it was supposed to be about 12 rules for life, right?

So there were 12 rules that he applied to life.

And if you follow these rules it'll in general make your life a lot better right and it was really interesting what he did because most people that go on a book tour you pretty much have your stump speech it's like a political speech you have your 45 minutes this is what the book's about here's my favorite anecdote this is what it was like writing it but jordan did something different every single night so some nights he would talk about one rule an hour and a half on just one rule some nights he would talk do go through all 12 rules some nights he wouldn't talk about the book at all it would be like oh today the new york times called me the head of the alt-right let's talk about that like

yeah.

And then the really cool part, though, was that, you know, we'd be in different cities every night.

And I would get to see that he would sort of tell a story.

And it was like, choose your own adventure because the next night he would just start from where he left off the night before.

But I basically, me and the tour manager were the only two people that got to see the full story for the year and a half, where he would, he would go as far as he could with some into some thought that he had about something, right?

Right.

About religion, about the nature of reality, whatever it might be.

And then the next night he would would just pick up at that point and start going again.

So it was unbelievably impactful for me to watch.

And it also, it made me a much better speaker also, because I learned to not, even though I knew this to some extent, to watch him go on stage.

And, you know, he's, he's a master of pauses.

So, you know, you can see him thinking.

He'll start talking.

Yeah.

And then he just kind of waits for a second.

And I can see it.

I know him well enough now.

He's going through the Rolodex to figure out where he wants to go next and he's mapping out all these different things.

And what I realized was when I go on a book tour or whatever whatever I'm doing in terms of public speaking, like I just map a little something at the beginning and I never give the same speech twice, ever, ever, ever.

And I try to see where it goes.

And, you know, sometimes sometimes it goes in a really different way than I would have intended, but I'm never afraid of that.

And I think that's really like the key if you're a public speaker, to be able to get up there, be present in front of those people.

And if they can see you like working through something, that is way better than here's the stump speech.

I could have just handed this to you on a piece of paper.

You know, thanks for your 45 bucks.

That's so true.

You know what?

You just like, it kind of like, that just kind of like resonated with me.

I just did an, I did it, my second TED Talk I did on last week, actually.

Nice.

In Houston.

And it gave me so much anxiety and stress to like to plan it, do it.

Like, I'm, I get really, really scared and nervous, especially because I feel like I don't trust myself.

I don't trust myself to go up there and be able to just like,

you know, and even with, and then what, what, what happened, what the, what happens is is you prepare, and because now you're preparing, it feels very stock, it doesn't feel authentic.

It feels very,

it feels, it just doesn't feel right.

And it stales.

It just feels very stale.

Yeah.

And so how do you feel?

Like, I don't know.

This is.

Well, everyone has a different way to do it, right?

So like for me, if I'm, if I, if someone says to me, you know, you're going to give an hour talk about something, usually

I actually, what do they talk about politics or I talk about big tech or I talk about my own political evolution or whatever's going on in the world that But normally, what do you normally get hired to speak about the number one thing?

Politics.

They usually don't ask me to talk about anything specific.

It's usually just kind of like what we're bringing you here.

Like, do what you do.

Every now and again, it's something specific.

Like, tonight, we want you to really talk about free speech or big tech or something like that.

But usually, it's just like, I don't know, I guess I hit like a nice moment where it's like they are just inviting me and then let me, they trust that I'll come up with something.

I never really thought about it that way, but I guess that

is a nice thing that has happened over time.

But for me, the way I do it is I very rarely think about what I'm doing until about five minutes before.

You don't get nervous?

No, no, because I've done it forever.

And I always felt as a comic, I never got nervous as a comic because I was holding the mic.

So, like, I used to see guys get heckled all the time and just fold, like completely sweating,

complete disaster, like dying in a pool of their own filth.

And I loved getting heckled because I was like, I have the mic.

Like, if I can't beat some drunk idiot while I'm literally standing there sitting, I'm on a stage, I'm holding the mic, I have the speaker.

If I can't do that, then what the hell am I doing?

So I never feared that.

I just, I never feared it.

So usually for me, but everyone operates differently.

For me, about five minutes before, I'm like, all right, well, what, how do I want to start?

That's the most important thing.

Like, so you get that initial connection.

And just, how do I want to start?

What do I kind of want to do in the middle?

And how do I want to end?

And, and then everything else is just getting to that point.

And, and then that really is it.

So I don't, you know.

And so when you did the, when you opened for Jordan, did you have the same thing that you did every night?

Or do you always do something different?

Not that was like a little bit of blend of both because I felt that I was there to support him, actually.

So it wasn't really about me.

I wanted to be as funny as possible for that like 10 or 15 minutes up top because then he does serious stuff, like literally people crying in the crowd.

I mean, I saw incredible, incredible things.

The best story that I can tell you about that is that we were in Dublin.

And, you know, when you do these big theaters,

as the performer, you don't walk out the front because everyone's standing there at the end.

So they usually have like a side door, which is kind of hilarious because then they put you out in a side door in like a little alley, which if anyone's waiting for you, it's not great.

But anyway, it was about 1 a.m.

after, you know, he does the meet and greet, signs all the books.

We had just flown in that morning.

It was a long day.

Jet lagged.

I don't even remember where we were in another country the night before, like all of that stuff.

Long, long day.

And we get out into the alley.

And it's really dark, which is like a little light in the distance.

And it's me and the Jordan's wife, Jordan, the tour manager.

So just four of us were out there.

He didn't have security at the time, it was very, very different.

And we see these two guys about 50 feet away from us, and it seems like maybe they're fighting or something.

We can't quite tell.

And then they start walking towards us really quickly.

And we all kind of were like, Uh-oh, what's going on here?

And then, as they got closer, we could see they both had been hysterically crying.

One of the guys was about 55, one of the guys was probably about 25.

And it turned out they were a father and son who had had a falling out like five years before, had not seen each other in five years, both read the book independently, came to the speech by themselves, saw each other at the show, and made amends right there.

I just got chills telling you that.

And we saw it, they told us that Jordan began to cry, his wife began to cry, John, the tour manager, began to cry.

I'm not much of a crier, but like something, something was going on there.

Like that type of thing, like that type of thing.

Incredible.

That is incredible.

I mean, I liked him from jump.

Like, I thought he was, I loved his

way.

I didn't realize he was, like, I never expected him to become as popular as

I saw things.

We were in

Amsterdam, a guy with a yellow vest that was doing the, you know, the, the gurney, what do they call it?

The thing that goes to the plane, not the gurney, the

whatever.

Oh, the air control.

Yeah, like, not the guy on the ground, but the guy that's like the thing that connects to the plane, the air wall.

Yeah, whatever it is, yes.

Whatever that thing is.

He literally saw Jordan and ran onto the plane and was like, going, crazy, you changed my life.

I got, I got this job because you, the pilot kind of realized what was happening because he probably could have gotten a lot of trouble yeah yeah yeah and it was like he was like thank you thank you you're not you know you're not allowed to be here but but I over and over again I saw that but anyway the the you asked me about the process with that so for Jordan's shows I didn't always do something different every night because I wanted it to be as happy and fun as possible at the beginning so that he could then do his hour and a half.

And then at the end, we did a half hour together, which was a Q ⁇ A that also I tried to make funny.

Cause my feeling was if I can get them laughing at the beginning, Jordan does something deep and powerful, which is what they're there for, but then leave on a good note.

I wanted the end to always be funny so that they walk out.

And I know that for the rest of their night or the next day, they're going to be thinking about all the things that Jordan said, not the jokes that I made.

But if the feeling that they walked away with was like, wow, it was great.

fun at the beginning and I can't believe how much I laughed.

And then at the end, there was this other, you know, silly thing or whatever.

So that's really that's amazing.

Did you, because what year did you say you started your podcast YouTube channel?

The YouTube show started when I moved to LA in 2013.

2013.

Yeah.

And then that was, that whole year with Jordan was 2000.

17.

It was 17 into 18.

Yeah.

So between 2013 and 2018, like, how did you gain so much track?

Like, did you, or did the Jordan thing really kind of help escalate your well, it was kind of, it was kind of like, it was going like that.

The Jordan thing blew it up for sure.

But what, what happened even before that, like a year before that was I started, you know, I was a lefty, I was a progressive, I was on the Young Turks, all of that stuff.

How did you go from liberal to where you are now?

I want to ask you.

Well, I still consider myself, I mean, liberal in the truest sense of liberalism that Bill Maher is always trying to say, I'm still a liberal.

And I'm like, Bill, that may well be true, but you're just living in the wrong time now.

We can't discuss with him later tonight.

We're always arguing that out.

So in a perfect sense, I am still a classical liberal.

My first book, Don't Burn This Book, was a defense of classical liberalism.

I still agree with every single thing that I wrote out there.

But unfortunately, defending my liberal values has become a conservative position.

So that's why conservatives, conservatives, ironically, are defending liberalism, but to explain that all the time over and over gets very confusing and lost in the weeds.

So I don't bother saying I'm a liberal anymore.

I don't mind if someone who understands what liberalism means, meaning individual rights and laissez-faire government and logic and reason and all of those things.

I don't mind if someone says that to me.

Yeah.

But every now and again, someone will be like, you're still a liberal.

And I'm like, well, I'm not exactly sure you mean that the way that it really was intended to be.

But, you know, you know, you're a communicator.

You can only spend so much time like

giving definitions to everybody.

But what had happened around 2016, as I was waking up to the craziness of the left, because I was on the Young Turks and it was, they were just nuts and everybody that they disagreed with was a racist and blah, blah, blah.

And there was an unbelievable hatred of Israel, even back then, which I didn't really understand because it was the only place in the Middle East that had anything remotely close to their progressive values and all of that stuff.

I did a video for PragerU.

It was my first video.

And it was called Why I Left the Left, which has now been seen like probably 50 million times or something.

And what's interesting about it was it was just me explaining kind of the difference between progressivism and actual liberalism.

And never in the video did I say I left the left.

I still believed I was, it's sort of Bill Maher.

Now I was like, I am on the left.

These people are crazy.

I am trying to fight for, you know, what's right here.

Right.

So when I woke up that morning, because you shoot those videos because they have to animate it and everything they shoot those videos like six months before they come out i don't even think i knew it was coming out that day and i woke up that morning and i look at my phone and it says dave rubin prager you dave rubin why i left the left and i was pissed because i thought this is not right i did not leave the left this whole thing you know like they've they've titled it in such a way because i didn't make up the title i wrote the script but i didn't title it and uh and i was pissed and i think i was about to get on the phone with them i was trying to figure out who to call or what you know how you got to change this and i went to the video on youtube and it had already within the first like three hours it had like 10 million views in three hours something like that don't quote me exactly on that but basically yeah within a day it had 10 million views but like that morning it i saw it just exploding right and i looked on twitter and all these people are talking about it and everything and i quickly looked at the comment section and i saw all of these people and everybody was like you know he's a liberal it makes sense like these progressives are crazy and blah blah and i was like you know what let me just leave the title let's just let's just let it be be.

This thing's working and it's cooking.

And then that was the next thing that really kind of blew things up.

So I had my career was kind of like going like this.

Then the Why I Left Left video like really blew it up.

Then Jordan, which was probably about a year after that, that really blew it up.

And then, you know, there's been some other things since.

What are the other things that kind of, because you're like in the, like, why didn't you ever do the, like, you know, Ben Shapiro, what's this thing called that he, you know, the, what does he, what's the, what's the media company?

Oh, Daily Wire.

Daily Wire.

Yeah.

But you're not really, you're not a part of the Daily Wire.

I'm not, I'm completely independent.

Well, that was the other thing that along the way I went.

So I started at the Young Turks, and then I was on Aura TV, which was a digital network created by Larry King, who became like a not only a friend, but a mentor and like a bonus grandfather to me, which was absolutely amazing.

And then I was at this other little startup for a few months called Riot.

That just kind of, oh, that was actually before

Aura.

That actually didn't, we just went in different directions.

They decided to do like 3D video.

I'm not even sure the company exists.

So that's, then I went over to Aura.

And then from Aura, the show was really blowing up because now that why I left the left video had come out and more people were starting to pay attention to me.

I was finding the old school liberals.

So that, so I, that's where I interviewed Sam Harris for the first time.

And I had Ayan Hersey Ali and Douglas Murray, who I'm sure you know is absolutely incredible.

So I was finding like the people that I was sympathetic with that I really like.

And nobody was really talking to them in an honest way.

That's what's so interesting.

Like going back to like 10 years ago, nobody, they weren't really in mainstream in the ether at all.

Like you were kind of like doing these things that were very much peripheral, like ancillary,

but that now has become very mainstream.

Well, it's fun.

It's kind of funny.

It's sort of why I actually don't like interviewing as much as I used to.

Yeah.

Because

everyone's kind of doing it.

You're actually quite a good interviewer.

It's very obvious to me from the beginning.

You're fully listening, like you're engaged, like you're looking at me the whole time.

You're not like staring at like, what's the next question and everything.

But like everyone's kind of doing it now.

And it's not that that makes me enjoy it less.

It's just it doesn't feel as novel.

So it's not

Phoenix, my producer, sitting right here.

He knows like we've, we've shifted the show a little bit where we don't feel like we just have to get an interview for the sake of getting an interview.

It's much more who do I want to talk to and why do I want to talk to them and all that kind of stuff.

But but the reason that I did the long form interview, which again, now everybody does.

But when I started doing that around 2015, it was really only me and Rogan online.

And he was just starting.

So this is sort of pre-Joe Rogan Rogan, which nobody really remembers, but he was not the, he was more fear factor Joe Rogan than Joe Rogan of now.

And the reason I wanted to do it was I felt that everything was making people stupid.

It was when Snapchat was huge and Vine, you remember Vine?

I remember all of this.

Twitter,

these six second videos, and everything was making people stupid.

And I was like, all right, I'll do the reverse of that.

And I always love Larry King.

And I love that show.

I love the way he interviewed.

And I know people felt he was a softball interviewer or something, but I thought he was thoughtful and interesting and funny when he needed to be and everything else.

And he let his guests talk.

And that's really how I decided to do it.

And clearly, there was some kind of need for that.

And so, I guess when you must have been kind of wait, so there's two things.

So, why after Aura did you not do or go on the Daily Wire thing?

Oh, well, Daily Wire that would be perfect for you.

Daily Wire, I don't think had even started yet.

So, basically,

he started a little bit after that.

Like,

I could be wrong.

I'm not even sure.

Well, it certainly wasn't the Daily Wire of

what it is now.

Like, I don't think they had other personalities.

Ben was kind of doing his own thing.

He was with Breitbart at that point.

Yeah,

it was definitely pre-Daily Wire, for sure.

But basically, what happened was Aura, you know, my show was really blowing up.

And then there was Larry, and they had like 10 other shows.

And the other shows were not doing well.

You've never heard of any of them or the hosts or anything.

Actually, William Shatner had a show on there, but you've never heard of what the show was.

I've heard of William Shatner.

You've heard of William Shatner, but the point was they had a show.

But basically, basically, my show was blowing up.

And Larry, obviously, was the big name.

And he was the, I think he was largely financially financially backing it as well.

But the more that my show blew up, the more they wanted out of us.

And the more that I felt I was supporting all of these little shows.

And I was like, no, I don't want to be that.

I want to either, I either want to be on a network where there's 10 great all-star shows and I'm trying to like force my way in, or I'll just go independent.

And I chose the latter.

And I remember walking out of a meeting with one of the executives there one day and they just like showed us a spreadsheet of like numbers they wanted us to hit and revenue to hit and thinking, wait, wait a minute, I'm the only one here who, besides Larry, who has a show that's working.

Why are you demanding all this of me when none of these guys can get 10 views?

And then I was like, we're going independent.

And for a little, so we went independent and for a little while, for about four months, I borrowed Roseanne Barr's studio.

She has a studio in El Segundo, right by the airport in LA.

We had become friends like a year before, built my set in her place.

And then Roseanne, God bless Roseanne.

She's obviously a little nutty, as she would admit.

And doing business with her was rather difficult so after four months i was like now i'm done and then that was when we finally

we finally had saved up enough money bought a house in sherman oaks turned that into the garage into the studio and that's then the show exploded that studio that you may remember that's when that was we moved in in november 2016 jordan as i said he's he was cooking september october the first interview that i did when we moved into the house was jordan on skype because we didn't even have internet yet my studio wasn't built i had to jack internet from my neighbor.

And I have this very, you can find it online from November to the end of November 2006, or maybe beginning of November 2016 of me interviewing Jordan about C16 and Peter Pen and all this stuff.

And the internet's horrible because it's scrambly and everything.

And that, and that really was kind of the beginning of now, of all the stuff that now I guess people know of me.

Because the Rubin report though on YouTube, how did you kick?

Because I was thinking like you have so you've like two and a half million, 2.2 million or whatever subscribers on there.

Yeah.

Because is it harder now to gain traction?

Or like, was it easier back then?

Or did you say like all those videos, like the left, why I left the left?

Or all the, is that what kind of helped kind of yeah, it all kind of

actually, the thing I'm, you didn't ask me this, but the thing I'm like most proud of when it comes to numbers and I try not to get lost in numbers at all is that we have never put a dime into advertising ever, ever, ever, ever.

It's all organic.

It is completely organic ever.

And it's so hard to grow on YouTube.

It's so hard.

Well, to that point, I mean, I would suspect, I don't know, because I'm not trying to build the channel now, but like, it's a, well, no, no, no.

I mean, I'm trying to continue to build my channel.

I'm not sure to build now because

my guess is it would be much harder.

Well, no, now for me to continue to grow, I mean, every month we're breaking every record every single month.

It's crazy.

My live streams are blowing up.

And, and I don't say that to pat myself on the back.

I said it out of like, I think we're genuinely doing something good and we have a good team behind it.

And it's important relative to the craziness of the world and all that stuff.

Yeah.

So I suspect now, you know, when I got on YouTube around 2013,

it still was the Wild West.

Nobody knew what it was, really.

People were doing videos and then you could do a reaction video that would get put under the video.

And it was, it was like a whole different thing.

And it was new.

So nobody knew how to master the game.

Now, now there's a zillion companies that are there to master the game.

Also, everybody and their brother wants to be a YouTuber now.

So my general suspicion is, I mean, you've seen some new people get into the game now, usually because they're extremely well funded.

They've done, they've done something else.

They made it in some other world.

Then they get on YouTube.

They have enough money to like, you know, put some rocket fuel on that.

Yeah.

But that's what I was going to say is that that's what I was wondering because back then it had to be more organic.

It was much more the wild.

It's still the wild west.

People still to this day have no idea how to break YouTube at all.

But the people who I see are doing it, I'm not sure if it's just bots and people are just doing that and or that it's just people who are very wealthy who are putting a shit ton of money in advertising and buying a shit ton of traffic because it's so difficult.

I think there's probably every combination of those things, but you know, even that sort of thing, like it does, at some point it doesn't work.

No, it doesn't.

You know, it doesn't work at some point.

Like, you can, you can throw a gajillion dollars into something.

You can get a certain amount of views out of nowhere and all of that stuff.

But, like, the longevity of it is that you're hopefully doing something good and worthwhile and everything else.

So, like, when I see now, my YouTube, my analytics guy is amazing.

And when he shows us that every month we're just crushing it and that our live streams now are getting hundreds of thousands of views a day.

You know, a lot of the live live streams.

We do we're live every day at 11.

So every day Monday through Friday at 11 for about an hour, we go against the view.

So I like to think that the real divide in America is not left versus right or conservative versus liberal.

It's Rubin Report viewers versus view crazy people.

That's sort of the divide.

Seriously?

Well, no, no, no, not that, but seriously, you go live.

Not that far, but no, no, no.

I mean, it's sort of, yes, seriously, no, but yes.

No, no, what I mean is you go, I didn't even know you did a live stream every day at 11 o'clock.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And how many people are like listening to that?

I mean, if we looked, if we looked, he can pull up the numbers, but if we looked at our last five of them, I mean, I think one's got about a million views, one's got about 500,000 views, usually around 200 or 300,000.

Well, so the entire medium of like, in terms of like, and that's for an hour show.

That's not, and our watch times are great also.

So it's not like just people like clicking in and then getting the hell out of there, which a lot of videos have.

That's what most people, yeah, exactly.

So you do this every,

you're not doing it today, obviously.

We're traveling this week, but I'm doing a lot of these shows and, you know, we'll take a clip of this.

And if you don't mind, we'll put that on the channel.

And by the way, that'll be good.

That'll be good for you too, of course.

So we're trying, you know, the thing with YouTube is once you're in the game, you have to stay in the game.

So I mentioned to you about going off the grid for August.

When we started doing that years ago, I didn't put up anything for a month.

crushes you.

It completely ejects you from the algorithm.

And then you basically have to spend two or three months just pushing back in so that you can get close to your numbers before.

So now we have a whole system devised where I tape things beforehand.

We do some pre-package stuff and everything else because I would prefer not to 100%.

I would prefer to, I take August off to keep my mind fresh and disconnect.

And I think it's good for, I know it's good for me and everything else and for what I do.

I want to give that to my audience too, but we simply cannot do it.

Yeah.

Because we have to stay in the game because otherwise it will literally cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And it's not even about the money.

It's just that I want people to see my content.

You know, like you know, that's interesting you said that because like I was saying earlier,

I finished the second TED talk.

My first TED Talk went viral and it was crushing it.

It was up to like six million.

They had to pull it for something that was, had nothing to do with me for whatever for TED.

They had to pull it for three weeks and it never gained traction again.

It got stuck at that number because you can never,

once, once something stops, I feel like in the algorithm, then you're, that's what it is.

Well, no one really knows how to explain the algorithm or what's really going on there.

It's been written in so many ways by so many people over the years that it's sort of

it's its own thing.

It's like it's like Terminator 2, the machines have turned on and it is what it is.

And we're sort of all like at its mercy in essence.

But part of what it part for sure of what it feeds or what feeds the algorithm is newness.

So if a video, if you have a video that is new that gets on there, that is one of the pieces of what will deliver it into the endless stream of stuff, right?

So, if that video disappears and then you just repost that same thing, well, it's lost one nugget of the let's say 10 or 20 or 100 things that send it into the stream.

The way I see it is momentum's loss, right?

Yeah, well, that's that would be like the most simple way to

once the momentum is gone to kind of rejig the system, yeah, is impossible.

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Okay, so let me ask you, I got a lot of questions with regards to politics because, like I said to you at nauseam already, I'm not a big political person, but you are so good at explaining things and to like the layman's person.

Is there anything redeeming about the Democratic Party, in your opinion?

That's the first part.

No, it's so gone, it's ridiculous.

I truly wish I could tell you that I wasn't screaming about this for years.

This was so obvious.

Like, I didn't know it was going to end in this specific.

Well, did you see George Clooney today?

He came out against Joe Biden.

My God, when you've lost George Clooney, who knows?

No, I did not see it.

Who knows what the rest of the facts of life cast is going to say?

You know what I mean?

What's Joe going to say?

It's like, I know you can get that reference because you're of a certain age.

Everyone under 40 is like, facts of life.

What the hell is that?

Who's Tootie?

That is hilarious.

I love that.

That's such a great.

That's a great thing.

He was in Facts of Life for two seasons.

I think it was crazy at the end.

They suddenly opened a candy factory or something or a little coffee shop.

I have to present it.

Mrs.

Garrett and Mrs.

Garrett, too.

She was gone at the end, and then she was replaced by, yeah, she was replaced by Cloris Leachman.

But anyway, also Joe.

Okay, anyway.

Yeah, I could mostly talk about 80s sitcoms.

I would be way more.

I can go head to head with you on this.

80s sitcoms or 80, 80s pop culture is actually my natural green shit.

Oh, really?

That would be my real thing.

But do you like Golden Girls?

I know we're taking a toll at total.

Oh my God, is she kidding?

Do I like Golden Girls?

It's my favorite of all time.

I mean, what do you want to do?

What do you want to do here?

I mean, I've seen every episode of The Golden Girls at least 300 times oh no no no me too yeah i cried on may i believe it was may 18th or so 1992 when it ended when dorothy married uncle lucas yeah played by leslie nielsen of course from naked gun um oh my god you yeah do you know who created the golden girls by the way no who susan harris and do you know who susan harris is please tell me sam harris Sam Harris's mom is Susan Harris, who is one of the most legendary TV producers of all time.

She also created Soap, which was a little before our time.

That was in the 70s.

Soap had Billy Crystal.

He was the first gay character on television ever.

But at one time in 19, around 1991,

she was the most powerful person in television.

She had four shows in a row on NBC primetime Saturday night.

She had Golden Girls, Nurses, which was a spin-off.

That was about the hospital that was in Miami.

And then they had Empty Nest, which was also a spin-off with Dr.

Richard Muller.

The one that Blanche had a crush on,

of course.

Harry Weston.

Yeah, Harry Weston, yeah.

And then there was another show called Grand.

That only lasted for a year or two, but she had four sitcoms from 8 to 10 p.m.

NBC Saturday night.

And she's done a million other things.

Hold on a minute.

I'm still on the fact that Sam Harris's mom created probably, not probably, my favorite show of all time.

Yeah.

Like, it was,

I still, by the way, what's your favorite episode or line?

I mean, I could do this all day.

I could do this all day because I'll tell you something even more.

But it taught me a lot of things, too.

I mean, The Golden Girls was an incredible.

By the way, there's nothing funnier.

Like, Sophia and Dorothy, the relationship between the two, by the way, this.

Who's your favorite character?

I think Sophia is my favorite.

And Dorothy, I was gonna say, it's kind of like a tie between Dorothy and Sophia for sure.

I didn't, I never loved Rose that much.

I don't know why Rose was the you've always hated Betty White.

I never liked that.

It's rare.

It's rare.

Nobody, nobody's ever said that before.

I don't hate Betty White.

I've got hatred of Betty White, but she was just dumb.

I didn't like that humor.

I liked more Dorothy's sarcasm and Sophia.

But what I was, you, by the way, do you know there's a podcast that just started that's like at the top of the charts that's just people, two people riffing about the episodes of Golden Girls.

Oh, I got to talk to those.

Yeah.

I mean, it's crazy.

But what I was going to say to you is I still fall asleep.

If I can't fall asleep and I'm having a hard time, I watch an episode of The Golden Girls.

I mean, I literally, I do cardio to the Golden Girls.

I'm probably the only person on earth that that will keep me running.

No way.

Yeah.

How did we just meet now, Dave?

It's crazy.

It's crazy.

So I'll tell you one of the great lines of the Golden Girls.

You'll know the episode for sure.

Okay.

I'll know every episode.

So, you know, there were two episodes that involved Blanche's brother, Clayton, who's gay.

Who's gay?

And in the first episode, he comes out and it's a great episode and she's struggling with it.

And, you know, Clayton, I don't know the actor's name, but the guy that played Clayton was kind of normal.

He was just like a normal guy.

He had a southern accent.

So he talked like this, but like he was like a normal guy.

Now, this is, I'm watching this in like 1991 or something.

So this is really sort of before I'm, or 1989 saying, before I was before forming any thoughts really about sexuality, but there was something about that that I thought was interesting because he wasn't over-the-top flamboyant or whatever.

But the other episode that he was in is about two seasons later, I think it's season six, where he brings his partner, Doug, remember?

And they're going to get married.

And now think about that.

So this is, I think, 1990 or 1991, Saturday night, 8 p.m.

on NBC.

They have two gay guys.

Doug is a, uh, like another normal guy, just normal, straight appearing guy.

They're talking about getting married.

Gay marriage wasn't legal for another 30 years, basically, but they didn't make an issue out of that.

They talk about that two people can love each other and it's different.

They still have Blanche is still struggling with it.

Like it was real and honest and whatever.

But the line to me that is like the most incredibly brilliant line, it's subversive and dirty and crazy.

And the fact that this even got past the censors is amazing to me.

Blanche says, I don't understand.

I know you love this guy, but why do you have to marry him?

And Clayton says, well, I'd do anything for Doug, and he'd bend over backwards for me.

And it's like, think about that joke.

Think about that joke.

Like, it's actually hilarious.

Hilarious.

And then if you even look at sitcoms 30 years later, Modern Family, which I actually didn't watch Modern Family, but I know that there was a gay couple in it.

Yeah.

The gay couple in Modern Family, supposedly, one of the guys, I think of the fact I had a fear of public displays of affection.

And that's how they wrote in, oh, we're just not going to have gays either talk about sex or affection or anything else.

And that was 30 years later

where the Golden Girls did that back then.

And by the way, there's also an episode of the Golden Girls when Stan's cousin Magda comes from former Soviet Union and Dorothy at a bookstore at the end is telling her about classical liberalism and all of the great things about America.

I totally remember all of those episodes.

By the way, you did a great Clayton.

I'd do anything for Doug.

He bend over backwards for me.

I told, and then by the way, that was the last line

in the show.

And then they went to the music by the way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I can't believe you love.

And then the fact that Leslie Nielsen married Dorothy at the end, Leslie Nielsen, who to me, Naked Gun, is the funniest movie of all time.

And I loved, loved, loved him.

So that he turned out to be in those two final episodes.

And by the way, the show got better and better each season.

Better and better.

In season seven, it was the most baudy and ridiculous, and their shoulder pads were bigger, and the hair were bigger, and everything else.

But it was, and it was more over the top, and it was more biting, but it was just, yeah.

But by the way, it was, it was pushing the envelope with everything.

Like, even the blanche and the sexual in New Wendell constantly.

Like, what do all of Dorothy's jokes to her, like, completely, they wouldn't have that on TV now, even?

Yeah, yeah.

It was, it was way, way ahead of its time.

It was way ahead of it.

They were four incredible actresses.

The writing was amazing.

Oh, my God.

I also love Frasier, by the way.

I love Niles.

Didn't really like Frazier.

You didn't like Frazier.

You looked at a little too hoity-toity.

But that was the funny part, that Niles was such a hoity.

They were so hoity-toity.

It made it funny.

But Golden Girls, to me, to this day,

is the best sitcom of all time.

I will tell you a very underrated episode of The Golden Girls that nobody, you know, when people think of like the classical episodes, their classic episodes, it's not thought of that.

Season seven, so the last season episode, it's either episode 12 or 13.

It's called From Here to the Pharmacy, where Blanche,

the guy, condoms, the guy, no, no, not condoms, condoms, condoms.

That also happens at a pharmacy, so that's good.

Blanche, a guy from the Persian Gulf War comes back and says that he's been dating Blanche, but she can't remember who he is.

And it turns out to be his pharmacist or her pharmacist.

Wait, hold on.

What episode?

It's season, it's called From Here to the Pharmacy.

I believe it's season seven, episode 12.

It's either 12 or 13.

And a guy comes back.

A guy comes back.

He had just served in the Gulf War, which had just taken place.

And he now shows up, you know, dressed as a soldier.

And he shows up at the door.

And he's like, I've missed you, Blanche.

And she can't remember who he is.

And it turns out that they had been dating, but he was the pharmacist, Bill.

Oh my God, I do remember this.

Yeah.

And there's just a couple phenomenal, the whole, the first five minutes of that episode is just joke after joke after joke after joke it's amazing it was actually written by jimmy valet who is uh bill maher's best friend boy now i'm really dropping hollywood stuff holy how do you remember you even know like episode season I thought I was a fan and my sister and my mom, like, this is all we talk about is the Golden Girls.

It's actually kind of crazy.

I had no idea that you were such a fan.

that's not on your bio by the way sam harris has you know people give his mom golden girls things all the time or she had all this stuff

so i had a set of golden girls shot glasses that were given by susan harris really

wow i did aren't i have uh rue mclanahan's teeth uh they're no that's okay that's great do these by the way like that would be pretty great that would be amazing yeah david my husband tried to buy me one of her gowns for my birthday once not to wear but just it would be so cool because she had an estate sale rue mclanahan's estate sale and they had like all of her crazy dresses.

Remember her red dresses from George's funeral and all that stuff.

And there was one that it was going to be like 3,000 bucks for some like forgettable something.

And he almost did it, but then someone bought it instead.

Really?

And I knew somebody at one time who was a Hollywood like backstage guy who had one of their chairs from the Lanai.

From the Lanai.

And I was trying to get it.

I don't remember what happened to that.

Wow.

This is amazing that you are such a fan.

By the way,

the fact that they always use the word Lanai

always made me laugh.

Well, I now call our outdoor area the Lanai.

So do I.

I'm like, bring it out to the Lanai.

Everyone's like, what the hell's a Lanai?

By the way, I do it all the time.

This is sort of a Lanai.

That's the Lanai.

That's Lanai.

I say it all the time.

And people who like know Golden Girls laugh and like smile.

But like, it's kind of like the family truckster from the vacation movie.

You know, like,

but if you get the reference, you get it.

If you don't, you don't.

By the way, is your husband, what does he do?

He takes care of the kids.

He is full-time.

How many kids do you have?

Daddy, two kids.

two two kids base in essence twins but we have two surrogates oh within two months of each other so twins oh how old are they justin is the oldest he'll be two in a couple weeks and then luke will be two two months old you have like babies babies oh my god they're like little people sort of like wimpalumpas and they yeah yeah they you feed them and spin them around

and then put them to sleep for a bit like i didn't know you had two little babies yeah wow how have you been married to who's your husband what's his name his name's david also which i thought you said people think that's spectacular and hilarious David is a little bit of a bad thing.

We got married in 2015.

We've been together since like 2011 or something, which is like, that's, you know, that's 13.

That's 11.

Let's say we've been together 13 years.

That's like 30 gay years or something.

That's, I was going to say, you're probably the longest gay couple, like the longest time, like the longest amount of time spent together.

I think there are others in history.

Really?

Where?

Who?

Not in this time.

With your, with your memory.

No, no, 41.

No.

Well, I know people personally that have been together for, I know couples that have been together for 40 years, but like, yes, in like in LA, you know, in LA, yeah, LA.

Everyone here's on meth.

Yeah, exactly.

Everyone here in LA, they don't, they don't stay anywhere for too long.

Okay, let's get back to the politics because I have a million questions.

Or, like, wait, there's nothing redeeming.

Really?

Can't we do more on the Golden Girls?

I would.

I would actually like to do a whole episode.

I'd like, if I would have known that you were such a Golden Girl person, I would have had rapid fire questions for you.

Oh, my God.

And I would have asked you to do that.

There's nothing you could get past me.

Well, I didn't, of course not.

And you know, the episode in the same season with the line.

Yes.

Oh, no.

we do why i have to go to i have to go to dr drew and you don't want to cross dr drew

i'll cross dr drew you can tell him i'll cross him happily yeah what do you mean how far is it i haven't even gone started with pasadena yeah

yeah this is making me really upset i'll do it again we'll do it again we'll do it again or you come to miami you can't you ever come to yeah i do but like come to miami we'll drink we'll go slate

and we'll watch the golden girls well that's been a great day god too bad you're gay you're like a perfect person for me i love you well that's how how it works.

I mean, it's always like that.

I mean, my husband would love hearing that, but that's besides the point.

No, no, good.

You should find the straight guy who could watch the Golden Girls.

Watch Golden Girls

on a marathon.

That's a whole other story and a whole other episode.

But listen, okay.

I want to ask you about politics.

We saw the whole fiasco that happened.

Even the Democrats were like mortified at his performance.

Isn't that, in my, isn't that kind of elderly abuse?

Yes, it's complete elderly abuse.

It's complete elder abuse.

I was with, I always tell the story, but I had two grandmothers who both had dementia into Alzheimer's sort of things at the end.

One in particular, because I was doing stand-up in New York, I would work at night.

So I had daytimes to be around her and take her to the doctor and the geriatric doctors and the cognitive things and all that.

It's the exact same thing.

It's the exact same thing.

The stiffness, the awkwardness, the slurring, the confusion, the way he uses certain phrases to kind of reset things in his brain, all of the stuff.

It's there.

Everyone knows it.

I'm not a doctor.

Everyone knows it.

But the thing is, everyone has known it for way, way longer than the last two weeks.

I did a video the day he was sworn in.

We're holding it.

We haven't reposted it yet.

But the day he was sworn in, I said I would retire if he makes it to the end of, if he is sworn in a second time.

Right.

Because that is how confident I have been the entire time that this sham would fall apart.

And now we are seeing it.

Usually what happens with the media is they lie about something.

There is just some lie, whether it's Russia hoax or COVID things or something.

And they lie for a while and then the truth eventually catches them.

What happened on debate night is the first time I've ever seen this with the mainstream media, where it was so patently obvious what was happening to him, the gaping mouth, the confusion, the inability to finish a sentence.

Even Jake Tapper was trying to help him and it couldn't, it didn't really work.

Trump, Trump, who was so controlled that night,

Trump's best line, though, was, I'm not sure he knew what he said.

And because he didn't mean it, he didn't mean it like, screw old man.

He meant legitimately, like, this is a problem, people.

I couldn't believe even he was, even he didn't even take shots

because it was like, it was like not even worthy of taking taking shots from it was unbelievable and now we just kind of usher in kamala or something but it's breaking it's breaking down way too early and yes she's she's awful but you have to remember the democrats all of them they're not they're collectivists by nature so really whether it's joe biden or whether it's kamala harris largely doesn't matter because they're not really running the show biden obviously has not really been running the show and i don't think kamala would be running show that's a that's a much bigger problem for america and what's happened to the presidency and the way we're viewed in the world.

But I don't think it, in terms of policy and how the country will operate, if it's Biden or Kamala, probably does not matter that much.

Well, I mean, I don't think anyone expected her to be so unlikable.

She's more unlikable than Hillary Clinton.

I mean, I thought she was going to be pretty bad, but this is like,

this is off the charts.

This is off the charts.

I mean, completely disconnected, completely, doesn't resonate with anybody.

Like, I don't know anybody who's like, oh, I like that woman.

Yeah.

Sonny Hostin likes her, I think.

Well, okay, that she can have her.

Yeah.

Because she's, I think she's atrocious, terrible.

But in a way, it's a kind of a good thing that's happened.

I feel for the Democrats because at least now they have a chance of

replacing him with someone who has a chance.

Because you can't hide.

He's obviously on medication.

People know, somebody knows, whether it's a secret service guy that has had to literally carry him to bed or it's the doctor.

The thing can't hold forever.

But that's what I mean about the lies.

Eventually, it happens.

The system lies for a while or ignores for a while, but then eventually it matches up, right?

So, eventually, it will happen.

And someone at the White House is going to jump ship and be like, you know what?

I can't hide this anymore.

Actually, they've been injecting him with stuff before the debates.

What could they be injecting him with?

Like adrenaline?

Like, what are they giving him?

God, don't they grind up children and they make him smoke it or something?

I know.

That's what I heard.

That's a conspiracy.

Yeah, I don't know.

No, no, I'm just like,

they drink the blood.

I don't know what they're doing.

No, who knows?

I mean, there's all sorts of known medications for cognitive problems.

And then, and then, you know, there's, there's obviously there's adrenaline, there's, um, there's a million different things.

But, you know, even when they did cater all, like there's stuff.

They could do AI.

Yes, that's true.

But like, you know, I've seen, I'm sure.

Crack.

Crack.

That could be one.

But even I've seen things when they were, when he was like reading speeches and he'll say things like, period, next paragraph,

comma, end of quote.

And nobody says anything.

I always say on my show, so I do the show off the top of my head, except for the outline of the show.

So Phoenix and I come up with an outline in the morning.

So I, so the outline that's running on the teleprompter, that's how I'm built to looking camera because we have a screen that I can look through, and that's how they do it on television, right?

Right.

The way that we do it is, I just have an outline.

Like it tells me

what clip I'm throwing to.

Then I speak off the top of my head.

Sometimes I screw up things on the prompter.

Of course.

That's not, that's just, it's hard to read and think at the same time.

Sometimes, sometimes he might have got a phone call, so the prompter isn't moving fast enough.

Like there's a million of them throwing him under the bus right there.

Yeah, you're a really good diet.

You're doing fine.

You're doing fine.

You can still have lunch today.

Anyway, the point is, like, I can give a very long leeway and runway for people screwing up things in public speaking and everything else.

Even Phoenix.

He does not, even Phoenix.

He does not know what he is doing.

I know.

That Stephanopoulos interview was worse than the debate.

Stephanopoulos basically had 22 minutes to repeatedly say to him, Are you alive?

Are you alive?

Is anyone in there?

Anything happening over there?

And he could not complete a sentence.

So we are in, we're in a weird time, sister.

I horrible time.

Okay, thank god.

I'm drinking hydrated hydrogen water.

Hydrogen water by life force water.

Thank you for the water, guys.

Um, I was gonna say something else, but I know you gotta wrap it.

One more thing: Donald Trump.

Can we just talk about Donald Trump for two seconds?

Sure.

So, are you a fan of Donald Trump?

You had him on the side?

Yeah, I basically like him.

I've I'm friends with Junior, and I'm friends with Ivanka and Jared, and I think they're absolutely lovely people.

And I've known Junior even before politics and all that.

I met Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

I've interviewed him.

I think he is a good, decent man.

I think I know you care about the future of the Jewish people.

He has three people.

I do, but I was putting this on you for a moment for whatever hesitation anyone listening to this might have if you're Jewish, like, because of all the insane things they say about him.

Like, his grandchildren are Jewish.

His daughter is Jewish, Orthodox Jew.

Yeah.

I've been to their place.

Like, these are good human beings.

I think if he can control a little bit of the craziness, that will be good.

But the system's going to throw everything they have at him now.

And my one fear at the moment is that it's feeling a little too overconfident, meaning we're all like watching the Democrat thing thing fall apart, but the system figures out ways to recalibrate, you know?

So

we got a long time to November.

So how about like RFK?

What do you think of him?

I like him a lot.

He is a decent human being.

Again, I've interviewed him.

We've had dinners and lunches together.

We've done live events together.

He is a good man.

I disagree with him on some things

where I would be considered more conservative, I suppose, or Republican on some things.

But those, but those, those are just little policy things.

Like the heart of the man and everything else is incredible.

but look as i said the day he announced he will not be a democrat by the end of this thing and he was not a democrat like two months later and now we're all seeing the true evil of the democrat party so unfortunately he's not going to be on all the ballots most likely and it's not you know they kept him out of the debate so but does he have a chance is he gonna take uh votes from let's say the i think he probably ends up taking more from biden which for my position would be good so if trump becomes president you can probably argue it either way there'll be a certain set of trump people that are really still pissed at Trump over vaxes, and he's particularly good on that.

So they might, but I think it'll be more that it will be the, it will be more like the average LA liberal who is not a complete psycho-woke maniac, who is like, I can't vote for Biden anymore because of the border and post-10.7 and all the other nonsense and dementia, by the way.

And they'll just be like, ah, but I can't vote for Trump or I won't feel good if I vote for Trump or my wife's never going to blow me again if I vote for Trump.

So, which is a lot of it, by the way, but that's a whole lot of people.

We could do a whole podcast on that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I am a firm believer.

It's the blowjob theory.

I've put this theory out there.

Did you?

It's a real theory.

Yes, that there are a huge percentage of men like blowjobs.

This doesn't matter, gay or straight.

Everyone likes blowjobs, and some people like giving them to, but everyone likes getting a blowjob, right?

And if you know that if your wife knows you vote for Donald Trump, you're getting 10% less blowjobs or your blowjobs are cut off in half, you are not going to do it.

And I think that that's been a huge, huge problem because women tend to be a little more liberal or lefty or have an aversion to Trump.

That is such a funny thing.

The blowjob theory.

You can use it.

You can use it.

We're going to clip that.

Okay.

Chelsea, we're clipping that blowjob theory.

That's a really good, that's a really good clip.

Clipping the blowjob theory.

Clipping the blowjob theory.

I know I have to, I have so many questions.

All right, one minute.

One minute.

One minute.

We really have to go.

It's Dr.

Drew.

Okay, fine.

Dr.

Drew's going to be very.

Cross him, you know?

I know.

He gets to be very evil if we were late.

Okay.

Okay.

So I asked you a little bit about Biden, a little bit about Trump, RFK.

I asked you about Kamala.

We kind of talked about...

Oh, Gavin Newsom.

Would they do that?

Oh, he's evil.

He's actually the devil incarnate.

No, I do.

And you should leave this state immediately.

You have a lovely house.

I like this operation.

It's a nice day here in LA, but you must leave this state.

He's coming to kill all of you.

Okay, when can we do this?

Can we do like a maybe like a four-part series?

Come to Miami, and we'll do it in my place, and then we'll come back.

I don't know how often I can come back here.

I know you were

quite grueling.

I know.

Although your mall here is nice, the sentry season.

It's a good, it's a good thing.

That ideally is just great.

Did you eat there at all?

I had some meatballs.

And the the fish there, my God.

You have some fish there?

I didn't have the fish, but it just looks amazing.

Like, it looks like Hollywood fish.

You've never seen

Hollywood fish at the Eatley.

All right, I have to go.

I have to go.

Okay, fine, Dave.

Okay.

Well, I guess you can come back.

Bye.

Have a nice time with Dr.

Drew.

All right, see ya.

And yeah, see you.

Take care, and we'll talk later.

Follow Dave Rubin.

He's amazing.

Bye.